
Book__._.^X/o 



HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 




OLD, AND NEW NORWAY 



HOME LIFE IN 
NORWAY 



BY 



H. K. DANIELS 



WITH TWELVE ILLUSTRATIONS 



NEW YORK 

THE MAGMILLAN COMPANY 

1911 



/^^ 






\^o^i% 



^ 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

IN order to obtain a general idea of the status 
of the peoples dealt with in these pages, the 
following notes should be kept in mind. 

The Norwegians are a yeoman race, without 
an aristocracy or nobility ; and therein is the 
main difference between them and the Swedes. 
There are, broadly considered, two classes in the 
country, with a very distinct line of cleavage, 
viz., the Bymand, or townsman, and the Bonde^ 
or peasant. The Bymcend, consisting in the 
main of merchants, shopkeepers, and their de- 
pendent workers, inhabit the coastal towns — the 
habitat of the fishermen — and a few inland 
centres, and the Bonder y either as sea Bonder or 
land Bonder, practically people the rest of the 
country. The Godseier class, corresponding to 
our landed and leisured gentry, are not very 
numerous, nor, with some few exceptions, particu- 
larly affluent ; wherefore have I taken the liberty 
of conferring on the more substantial Herr 
Grosserer, or merchant, seniority of place among 
the productive assets of his country. 

The Husmand and the Pladsmand are of the 



vi HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

Bonde caste, and are more or less dependent on 
its suffrages. The former is provided by the 
Godseier, ox 2. Bonde farmer, with house, fuel, and 
a patch of land in return for certain free services, 
which may, by agreement, extend over a stated 
period of years, or a lifetime. The Pladsmand 
owns his house, but not his plot of land, and he 
constitutes a class from which the farm labourer 
is drawn for service on \k\^ gaard, or farm, of the 
Bonde, or the Godseier, or for other general 
work. 

But to the peasant anyone hailing from a 
town is a Bymand, in the same way that the latter 
dubs all and sundry Bonde who dwell beyond the 
radius of his suburbs. To the south of Christiania 
centuries of contact with neighbouring Denmark, 
Holland, Germany, and Sweden have produced 
a race and cult with a greater affinity to those 
countries than the Norwegians to the north of 
Christiania. The latter are a taller, stronger, 
and hardier breed, and more in keeping with our 
conceptions of the original Viking of the Sagas. 
Yet north or south, east or west, the Norwegian 
townsman and peasant are very much akin, and 
of characteristics peculiar to their country. Their 
notorious lack of cohesion in local matters and 
their love of litigation is only equalled by their 
wonderful unanimity should any great national 



AUTHOR'S NOTE vii 

crisis arise. Their honesty is proverbial, and 
even the peasant's written or spoken word is his 
bond. The latter may have his faults — always 
assuming that they are faults from our point of 
view (who have so many virtues to spare), but 
he will never acknowledge them : which is a very 
grave fault indeed. Therefore have I beeii at 
pains in the pages that follow to review his home 
life impartially and, as it were, through both 
spectacles ; as also in the hope that my efforts 
may be accepted by him as a sort of amende 
honorable for any hard sayings which his alleged 
contrariness may have induced me at other times 
to launch at his devoted (if perfectly indifferent) 
head. 

H. K. D. 



CONTENTS 



Author's Note 

CHAP. 

I. The Grosserer 
II. A Dinner Party 

III. Home Life in Flats . 

IV. Children, and their Education 
V. Norwegian Women . 

VI. Food .... 
VII. Food — continued 
VIII. Mistress and Maid . 
IX. Hotels and Restaurants 
X. Les Norvj^giens s'amusent . 
XI. In the Towns 
XII. Out of Doors 

XIII. Darker Norway 

XIV. The Peasant and his Home 
XV. A Day on a Better-Class Farm 

XVI. A Day on a Better-Class Farm — continued 
Index ..... 



PAGE 

V 

I 
II 

23 
29 

39 

57 

77 

93 

113 

135 

153 
179 

189 

211 

247 

267 

297 



IX 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Old and New Norway . . . Frontispiece V 

{Photo— S. J. Beckett) 

FACING PAGE 

A FoLKE Skole Interior .... 

{Photo— Wilse) 



34^ 



Churchwarden. Vik. Showing Offertory Bag, 

WITH Bell attached to Awaken Sleepers . 48 ^ 

{Photo— S. J. Beckett) 

Hay-making on a Mountain Farm . . .94 

{Photo— S. J. Beckett) 

A Skilober (Ski-runner) negotiating a "Hop" . 146 

{Photo— Wilse) 

Fish Market, Bergen . . . . 154 „ 

{Photo— S. J. Beckett) 

View of Christiania, from the Royal Palace . 174 

{Photo— Wilse) 

Ancient Wooden Church at Fantoft, near 

Bergen ...... 180 

{Photo— S. J. Beckett) 

An " Eagle's Nest " Dwelling, Geiranger. 
Showing, on the right, Children Tethered 
Out for Safety . . . . 198 / 

{Photo— S. J. Beckett) 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xi 

FACING PAGE 

Procession of Children on the National F^te 

Day, May 17 . . . . > 208/'' 

(Photo— Wilse) 

General Room in a Peasant's Cottage . .228^ 

{Photo— S. /. Bickett) 

Interior, from a Better-class Telemarken Farm 248 '' 

(Photo^ Wilse) 



HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

CHAPTER I 

THE GROSSERER 

IN a democratic country, where a Cabinet 
Minister is vouchsafed a salary of £^TO 
a year, a General and a Bishop are limited 
to ;^500, and a clerk and a servant-girl vegetate 
on £6^ and £\o respectively, it is not surprising 
that the Grosserer, or merchant with a net income 
of ;^iooo, should take premier rank in society, 
and, moreover, that the said income should go an 
astonishingly long way. A man in receipt of a 
clear ;^500 a year is very comfortably off, but the 
Grosserer and his ^looo is affluent among this 
aristocracy of the income. He will certainly get 
a great deal more out of it than his British 
confrere in receipt of treble that amount, and 
more. He should have no occasion to outrun 
the constable in the upkeep of a town house or 
flat, a country villa, a pair of horses and the 
requisite carriage and sleigh equipment, a large 
staff of servants, club subscriptions, fishing and 



2 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

shooting excursions, and an occasional trip with 
his wife and children to the Continent. And he 
lives well — exceedingly well — and from the Nor- 
wegian standpoint luxuriously. His wines and 
spirits are of the best, for, with the innate 
shrewdness of his race, he imports them direct 
and bottles them himself. He takes no chances 
on the bottling question. The cigars of his 
country are of the usual cheap Continental 
brands, and not at all bad smoking to those 
who don't ** know no different." But the Herr 
Grosserer does know the difference. So he gets 
them from England on a wholesale scale, out 
of bond, and thus for i|d. or 2d. obtains the 
equivalent of a fourpenny and sixpenny London 
smoke. His food is (always from the Norwegian 
standpoint) of the best and purest that money 
may buy. For his paternal Government is not 
disposed to regard *' preservatives " and "sub- 
stitutes " with a favourable eye, and were it to do 
so, has he not the State chemist and the columns 
of his newspaper wherewith to make his grievance 
public — and effective. He is particularly well off 
in the matter of fish and game, of which he is 
immoderately fond, and his large consignments 
of dried fish and other commodities to the South 
of Europe enable his Government (who are 
adepts on the tariff and '' most favoured clause " 



THE GROSSERER 3 

questions) to present him with a varied and cheap 
assortment of Southern fruits. A certain prone- 
ness to ostentation, which his own writers have 
dubbed stormands galskab — or the mania for 
being of greater consequence than you actually 
are — will oftentimes lead him, like his Irish 
brother, into living "a little bit ahead of him- 
self"; and improvidence is, alas, a failing which 
is pretty general among both classes of his 
country-men. He has also another weakness, 
if a natural goodness of heart may come within 
that definition : he will back a bill for a friend 
or a relation — especially a relation — on the least 
possible provocation. For which reason I have 
not dealt with his alleged capital, for it has been 
long since merged in the form of assistance to 
his poorer relations, of whom the prolific quali- 
ties of his countrymen present him with an 
embarrassing number. Throughout his life he 
never quite loses sight of these relations. His 
house is open to them at Christmas, Easter, and 
other seasonable vacations, and should a junior 
member be out of a berth his period of ** resting " 
may be passed in the primal home as a matter 
of course. Should a financial cataclysm reverse 
their positions, the Grosserer and his family have 
always a haven of refuge to betake themselves 
to until such times as matters get straightened 



4 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

out. And the same will apply to bonde^ husmand, 
labourer, and the rest. 

All of which will have doubtless led the reader 
to assume that the Norwegian merchant pater 
is a genial, affectionate, and home-loving crea- 
ture, with a wife and children no less fond of 
him, and in this assumption he will be right. 
The Herr Grosserer has no particular love for 
the restaurant as the German has, or the club, 
which the Britisher affects. He likes to drop in 
at the former occasionally for his pjolte (whisky 
and soda) or glass of baiersk ol (Bavarian beer), 
and listen to the orchestra dealing with his 
favourite Olsen, Svendsen, Nordraak, Kjerulf, 
or Grieg — for he is above all things patriotic 
and partial in his musical taste. But he does 
not dine and wine his family and friends at the 
restaurant ; and his club, which is a very mild 
affair indeed in comparison with the "Senior" 
or the Athenaeum, will seldom contain him longer 
than is necessary to glance through the news- 
papers and magazines, and exchange a friendly 
political chat with a fellow-Grosserer, General, or 
Statsraad. In short, he is all for the home 
life and the amenities of the family circle, his 
womenkind naturally concurring. 

What, then, is his attitude towards the latter 
generally? — and in the question I include the 



THE GROSSERER 5 

entire male kind of Norway. Let me dispose of 
the peasant for the nonce, returning to the 
subject when dealing with him on later occa- 
sions. He is absolutely indifferent in his attitude 
towards the other sex — with a tacit indifference 
so complete, yet deadly, that one of his greatest 
writers has described its effect upon the weaker 
vessel as exceeding the cruel results of a physical 
blow. He will not like this if he should ever 
read it in the vernacular among the Lutheran 
treatises on his little bookshelf in the corner ; 
but he will readily forgive me, as he has already 
done times out of number, when I have thundered 
at him on his alleged domestic shortcomings. 
He may possibly duck his big, round crop-head 
as one dodging an unexpected and uncalled-for 
physical assault and glance apprehensively at his 
other "rib," as she bends expressionless and 
sphinx-like over her knitting in the half light ; 
but fortified by centuries of infallible conviction 
that he is profoundly correct in his views on the 
sex problem (which is no view at all), he will 
dismiss the subject from his mind with a " Ja-Ja " 
of indifference, and turn into his ''four-poster" 
to smoke out his pipe with an easy conscience. 

The Herr Grosserer's attitude towards the 
woman who has succeeded in coaxing *' a vote " 
out of him is of a far different nature. To him 



6 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

she is very dear indeed, with an endearment that 
ranks her only second to himself and his first- 
born son in his heart of hearts. But — ugh! 
these buts — he is less deferent towards her 
than is his English brother in his sexual rela- 
tions. Indeed, I have heard the word '' ungallant " 
whispered at times (and by his travelled country- 
men) with a persistency that has been highly 
disturbing. But you may take it from me that 
he is far and away more gallant than the German, 
and not more ungallant than the average foreigner 
who has satisfied himself, in his own opinion, that 
Englishmen and Americans (to say nothing of 
Colonials) spoil their women by a superfluity of 
the attentions. 

The Herr Grosserer is remarkably well-in- 
formed on all questions of foreign policy and 
political economy ; and the British problems of 
'* Lords and Commons," ** Housing of the Poor," 
" Home Rule," and ''Votes for Women," are as 
familiar, and unsolvable, to him as to the man in 
Fleet Street. His newspapers are numerous, 
enterprising, and intensely — if not monotonously 
— patriotic. They have, as special correspondents 
in every capital of importance, countrymen noted 
in the domain of belles-lettres, who, in column- 
long articles, give the Herr Grosserer a pretty 
intimate account of the domestic, literary, 



THE GROSSERER 7 

theatrical, musical, fashionable, and political 
events of the world at large. In the feuilleton 
space, or ''down in the cellar" as he humorously 
terms it, there is generally an English serial for 
the edification of his Frue and the Frokne ; and 
the libraries and booksellers' shops are prolific in 
their supply of the best English, French, Russian 
and German authors, in the original or translated. 
Then there is the periodic homecoming of Herr 
Konsul Jensen or Herr Agent Hansen from 
their foreign activities for a short holiday spell 
of rest. These gentlemen are pleased, in the 
interest of their country, to furnish any and every 
kind of information on the commercial position 
of affairs within their foreign spheres of know- 
ledge and experience — on demand, and at their 
advertised addresses. To them the Herr Gros- 
serer will repair with avidity, and get to know all 
he is concerned to know, absolutely *' free, gratis, 
and for nothing." 

Personally the Herr Grosserer is a very hard- 
working man. Nine or half-past nine sees him 
in his office, and with the exception of a couple 
of hours' interval when he toddles into the family 
circle for his meals, he is steadily at it until the 
hours of six or seven. So devoted is he to a 
business whose every ramification he knows 
to the least detail that he has little relish for 



8 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

retiring, even when advancing age begins to 
pluck at his sleeve. Like the British police 
superintendent, or the publican, he has a 
vague notion that retirement and dissolution 
are synonymous terms, and he will keep put- 
ting off the dreaded day until the very last, 
when his son (and right hand) will step into 
his place. 

He is not concerned with the affairs of the 
house beyond his duties as paymaster in defraying 
his womenfolks' very moderate demands, and 
the young ladies, his daughters, are free to go 
and come whenever the spirit may so move them, 
without any undue catechising on his part. But 
he does not like that young cavalry lieutenant. 
Neither do his fellow-Grosserere like him. No- 
body who has a daughter with a substantial dot 
in prospective does seem to like him, somehow, 
except the daughter aforesaid, and possibly the 
mother, who at least does not dislike him. For, 
alas, he is practically without an Income, and his 
prospects of promotion are Fabian to a degree. 
He is, moreover, of the peasantry, from whence 
he is directly recruited and specially trained. 
But then he is such a fine, handsome, manly 
young fellow, with the very airs of the mountain 
and forest still upon him, even in the close 
atmosphere of the crowded ballroom. And 



THE GROSSERER 9 

how well he dances ! And, above all, look at 
his uniform with its buttons and braid — he has 
never appeared before them in his original home- 
spun and hobnails — is he not positively ravishing ? 
Papa is buttonholed, coaxed, cajoled, and gener- 
ally bamboozled by poor uniform-stricken mama 
on behalf of their hopelessly infatuated pigelil. 
Papa, for once in a way, throws back to his 
Viking progenitors and storms and raves like a 
veritable Berserk, Mama cries. So do the 
pigelil and her sisters. Everybody cries, even 
to the women-servants, who are every bit as 
concerned for a favourable issue as the pigelil 
herself. Papa suggests, as a compromise, a 
period of foreign travel, with a lengthened stay 
in Dresden. He might just as well have sug- 
gested a period of astral flight with a prolonged 
sojourn in the moon. Mama won't hear of it. 
The pigelil is too far gone to hear of anything — 
except her lieutenant. Papa seizes his hat and 
stick and rushes off to his club to think it all 
out over a cigar, coffee, and liqueur ; and then, 
returning later on under the humanizing influence 
of those sedatives, gives the hysterical \\t\\^ pigelil 
his blessing — and her lieutenant. 

And that is the reason why the fortune-hunting 
young peasant lieutenant is not beloved of the 
Grosserer, nor anyone else beneath his rank 



lo HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

whose daughter Is entitled by law to her dower. 
But the young lieutenant doesn't mind that in 
the least. Why, it is of the very essence of the 
game — which he is always winning, even now as 
it ever shall be. 



CHAPTER II 



A DINNER PARTY 



THE Norwegian selskab is a very formal, 
not to say tremendous, affair. It is appar- 
ently an institution designed less for eating 
purposes than for speech-making and the mixing 
of miscellaneous drinks. Yet when compared 
with the eclectic dietary of some of our dinner- 
parties there is an element of refined barbarism 
about it that is not without its attraction, at least 
to those who can stand them, or a series of them. 
The Herr Grosserer issues his invitations (they 
are somewhat of the nature of a genial writ-of- 
attachment) eight days previous to the execution 
— pshaw ! the dinner party ; and it is usually 
intimated that the occasion is in honour of a 
particular guest. Winter is the season proper 
of the selskab, and half an hour before the dinner, 
which is usually at 6 p.m., the sleighs with their 
complements begin to arrive at the Herr Gros- 
serer's door, he and the Frue Grosserer being in 
readiness in the drawing-room to receive their 
guests as soon as the wraps and goloshes have 



12 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

been removed in the hall. Incidentally it should 
be mentioned that weddings take place between 
the hours of 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. in order that the 
inevitable selskab may round off the happy 
occasion as a sort of *' wedding dinner." 

Unpunctuality in arrival is considered a very 
grave breach of manners, and (accidents apart) 
it would be difficult to surmise what would 
happen in such an eventuality beyond the cer- 
tainty that at any future Grossererial selskab the 
offending person or persons would be rendered 
highly conspicuous by their absence. The guests, 
of whom there may be some thirty or more, are 
introduced to each other by the Herr Grosserer 
by name and profession, solemnly and exhaust- 
ively, as though he were empanelling a species 
of festive jury, and cards are distributed whereon 
the names of the several partners are inscribed. 
When the psychical moment has arrived the 
doors of the spise sal (dining room) are thrown 
open, and the Herr Grosserer leads the way in 
with the wife of the specially honoured guest, the 
Frue Grosserer with the specially honoured one, 
and the others follow on and take their places at 
the table, in conformity with duplicate cards dis- 
tributed thereon. The Herr Grosserer sits at the 
head of the table with the wife of the specially 
honoured guest on his right, and the Frue 



A DINNER PARTY 13 

Grosserer at the other end, having the specially- 
honoured one also on her right. This is the usual 

Menu 
Oysters. 

Soup .... Sherry or Madeira. 
Fish .... Claret or Burgundy. 
Entrees . . . Rhine wines. 
Meat Pudding. 

Roast Game . . Champagne. 
Caramel Pudding. 
Jellies, Ices, and Cakes. 
Fruit, various. 
Cheese, Biscuits, etc. 

If there be an udlaending (a foreigner, let us 
say an Englishman) among the guests, and he 
has never before been to a selskaby he is imme- 
diately impressed by the unusually large array of 
wine glasses that confronts him. They are of all 
sizes, shapes, and colours, and may on high 
occasions total as many as eight to each guest. 
But he will have little time to devote to an in- 
spection of the table equipage, for with the 
appearance of the first dish the Herr Grosserer, 
with an admonitory tap on his glass, is on his 
legs and drinking a velkommen til bords (welcome 
to my table) with his guests. 

With the champagne he is again in evidence 



14 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

in a rather lengthy speech in honour of the most 
important guest of the evening, whose health he 
finally invites his guests to toast, and who in 
turn responds with an equally solemn oration 
and an appeal to all and sundry to drink *' skaal " 
to their host. 

These preliminaries over, any one is at liberty 
to tap his glass, rise to his feet, and make a 
speech on any subject which the particular 
occasion may appear to demand. During the 
speeches, of course, all act of deglutition must 
cease. Between the intervals of speech-making 
the lesser ceremony (though it is formidable 
enough in all conscience) of the dual '* skaal " 
may be gone through at any moment between 
two gentlemen, or a lady and a gentleman. But 
it is not etiquette — indeed, it would be a betise — 
to invite your host to drink a ^* skaal " with you. 
He has already included you in the collective 
velkommen til bords, and he will probably, on 
his own initiative, raise his glass to you during 
the progress of the meal ; but you must not 
appeal to his suffrages on your own account ; 
and you will not do so unless you are an 
udlaendingy and don't know better. And the 
reason for this disability is very obvious. The 
Herr Grosserer will have had to drink collectively 
to his guests in his 



A DINNER PARTY 15 

Velkommen til lords, . . . say drink i 
To his honoured guest, . . ,, ,» i 
To the return '*skaal," . . ,, »> i 

To, say, a dozen " skaal " speeches, „ ,, 12 
To, let us say on his private 

initiative, ,, ,, 12 

Total drinks 27 

Having thus disposed of some twenty-seven 
**skaals" in wines of a more or less dangerous 
calibre, it should be apparent that if each of his 
thirty guests took it into his head to ** skaal" 
him separately the cumulative result of fifty- 
seven *'skaals" would (even if he were a music- 
hall chairman) have the effect of rendering the 
Herr Grosserer noisily, or morosely, indifferent to 
all subsequent proceedings. Happily there is 
no injunction in the matter of heel-taps, and it is 
not considered a penal offence to sip your wine 
when responding to a '* skaal." 

With your six or eight glasses beside you in a 
more or less filled, or empty, condition, you will, 
if you are an old hand, make the most of the 
intervals between the speech-making to satisfy 
your hunger. The wines are superb, and you 
would probably give a good deal to be able to 
enjoy them in your own particular way and with- 



1 6 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

out the necessity of having to **skaal" your 
neighbour whenever the craving is upon you. 
But you may not do this. To indulge in a 
surreptitious drink — ** on your own," as it were — 
is not considered good form ; yet wine drunk 
during the formalities of a '"skaal" cannot, in 
the opinion of the gourmet, receive full justice. 
At least that is . . . 

" Herr Ingenior Tompkinson. Skaal !*' 
Your fellow-guest opposite, glass in hand, is 
claiming your attention in the matter of a 
*' skaal." 

You lay down your knife and fork instanter, 
note the contents of his glass (which is Bur- 
gundy), find you are out of stock in that particular 
vintage, say undskyld (excuse me), fill your glass, 
and raise it with solemnity. You then gaze 
at one another portentously, sternly — even as 
duellists taking each other's measure — and you 
respond : 

" Herr General-Major Normandal. Skaal ! " 
The act of drinking having then followed, 
slowly, austerely, and without the least semblance 
of relish, you again catch the eye of your adver- 
sary, hold up your empty glass with a gesture as 
who should say, '* You see ; there's no deception," 
and then put it down, to go on with your dinner. 
There is no occasion for undue nervousness if 



A DINNER PARTY 17 

it be always borne in mind that the wine in your 
glass must ever correspond with that of which 
your ''skaaler " invites you to partake: Sherry 
to Sherry, Burgundy to Burgundy, Hochheimer 
to Hochheimer, but never Claret to Madeira, or 
Hock to Champagne. An udlaending may 
commit a faux pas with impunity, safe in the 
polite tolerance of the most courteous of peoples ; 
but were a Norwegian to bewray himself under 
similar circumstances the only conclusion that 
could possibly be arrived at would be that he 
had reached that unhappy stage when the classi- 
fication of wines is of no particular consequence : 
and this has happened — on occasion. Therefore 
there is nothing for it but to sit tight (in that 
word's sober sense), maintain a cool head, gauge 
your partner's inclinations with a view to a not 
too frequent "skaal" with her, and look to the 
permanent upkeep of your several glasses. 
Above all, be prepared to catch your name — 
especially if your host should be predisposed to 
utter it. A careless consideration of these 
matters is apt to engender panic, and lead to 
disaster. On hearing your name proclaimed you 
will probably start guiltily, and after a frantic 
performance, as upon musical glasses, drink the 
wrong wine to your fellow-guest's health — and 
your own confusion. 



1 8 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

" Skaals " and speeches apart, the ordinary 
traffic of the meal is marked by the greatest con- 
viviality and bonhomie. Indeed it could not 
be otherwise when it is remembered that the 
majority of the guests have probably known each 
other from childhood. The Norwegians, and 
especially the Norwegian lady, are adepts in the 
art of dinner-table converse, and awkward pauses 
are of the things that will not supervene if the 
Frue Grosserer knows her business in the selection 
of the guests. The " funny man " is of course 
there, as inevitably as the low comedian is in 
evidence at a Green Room Club dinner, and with 
the self-same pleasant task before him — to set 
the table a-roar. Shop, even among a nation of 
shopkeepers, is avoided, or left to those less 
competent to deal with it. The Herr Advokat 
is discussing the last Sinding composition with 
the Frue Generalinde. Herr Spilman, the com- 
poser, is talking " horse" to the Herr Grosserer's 
eldest daughter ; and his literary friend Hannson 
and the Frue Stadsraadinde are at one on the 
proper method of boiling spring cabbage. Even 
the grave Herr Statsminister himself is obviously 
far from the madding subjects of ''party" and 
international polity in his dealings with the 
charming young Froken Trylledal. Then in the 
middle of it all, when the Herr Doktor and the 



A DINNER PARTY 19 

Frue Admiralinde are laughing heartily at the 
latter's onslaught on the " decadent trend of 
modern novels," and the Herr Grosserer is in the 
middle of a '' big fish " story, the sound of the 
tapped glass falls like a bolt from the blue, and 
the Herr Vaerftseier (wharf-owner) Ollsohn is on 
his legs amid a silence that is of the most profound. 
But the ordeal is soon over, and with the closing 
'' skaal " the conversational din breaks forth 
afresh. 

All carving is done in "another place" — to 
wit, the kitchen, and the results are brought in 
and offered to the company by maids who have 
grown to woman's estate, and beyond, in the 
service of the Herr Grosserer. An evening such 
as this is one of the events of their lives, and it 
will not be their fault if the dinner-party should 
not be a success so far as the kitchen and the 
waiting are concerned. The selskab is every bit 
as much their selskab as it is that of the herreskab 
(company), and they are really enjoying them- 
selves immensely. They will pause at the sound 
of the tapped glass as though petrified, and, plate 
in hand, listen with eager approval to the Herr 
Kaptein's amiable and windy nothings ; and there 
is even an air of deferent familiarity in the 
manner in which they fill your glasses and hold 
the dishes at your elbow. No stertorous breath- 



20 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

ings and spilled gravies here. Under the bene- 
volent and matronly tutelage of the Frue 
Grosserer and subsequent years of practice, 
they are now as it were to the selskab born, 
and the honour of **the house" is absolutely 
safe in their deft hands. 

The duration of the selskab is always an in- 
ordinately lengthy one, and the Herr Udlaending 
may consider himself remarkably lucky if he gets 
off with anything under three hours. The signal 
for the " break up " is given, not by the host or 
hostess, but by a guest (usually the gentleman 
who has taken the hostess in), who it has been 
previously arranged shall at a certain hour rise, 
and after a general speech of a ''summing up" 
nature, invite the guests to drink the final '* skaal" 
of tak for mad (thanks for the food partaken) to 
their host and hostess. 

The company then rise. The host and hostess 
take up a position near the door, and the guests 
return to the drawing-room in their previous 
order, each one of them pausing on the way to 
shake hands with the Herr and Frue Grosserer, 
and, repeating the formula of tak for mad, are 
met with the variant velbekomne, literally *' much 
good may it do you " — without that expression's 
ulterior meaning. 

In the drawing-room, or salon (there are usually 



A DINNER PARTY 21 

two, or even three of ample Continental dimen- 
sions), coffee with cream, and liqueurs are served ; 
and about an hour afterwards the servants appear 
with a Gargantuan supply of whisky, cognac, 
mineral waters, and cigars. The remainder of 
the evening is then devoted to cards, music, and 
general conversation, and between the hours of 
one and two next morning, when the guests are 
having a dish of tea, the jangle of the first sleigh 
bells outside is usually the signal for a general 
leave-taking. On the Sunday following the 
guests leave cards with the Herr Grosserer ; his 
Frue, and his Frokne ; and there will be one at 
least among them who has already made up his 
mind to give a retaliatory selskab. 



CHAPTER III 

HOME LIFE IN FLATS 

NORWEGIANS of the better class have 
long since adopted the flat as the most 
contained and convenient form of dwell- 
ing to suit all seasons of the year. It is con- 
sidered more exclusive than the town house, 
whose ground floor is wholly devoted to shops, 
store-rooms, and the offices connected therewith ; 
although the latter, of course, contains a large 
proportion of the town population. A family in 
comfortable circumstances will usually occupy a 
flat of eight rooms, exclusive of kitchen, pantry, 
and servants* bedrooms. These rooms practi- 
cally open one into the other by means of large 
folding doors, and are far more extensive than 
similar apartments in England. The annual 
rent of a flat of this kind is about ^80, and to 
furnish it comfortably a sum of from ;!f 300 to 
;^400 would be required, which are large 
amounts when the small average income of the 
people is taken into account. 

The house containing the flat (as indeed all 

23 



24 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

Norwegian houses) is well and solidly built, with 
massive stone foundations, calculated to obviate 
settlements from cold and heat extremes, and to 
keep out the damp. A damp house is one of 
the rarities of the country. I have never had 
the misfortune to meet with one, and I have 
lived in a good many. Such a house as that 
under consideration will consist of four floors, 
with a front and back stairs for the use of the 
family and the servants respectively ; and never 
shall you meet with pails, sweeping-brushes, ash- 
buckets, or trays of soiled crockery-ware on a 
Norwegian front stairs landing, as are in such 
frequent and painful evidence on the staircases 
of a ** right little, tight little island " to the south- 
west. The front stair is usually carpeted, and 
on each floor there are commodious, well-lighted 
landings, admirably adapted to meet the tem- 
porary crush at dinner-parties, balls, and other 
festive occasions. 

The first room one enters is a species of 
vestibule or anteroom, corresponding in its uses 
(though more comprehensively) to the English 
hall ; and adjoining this is a smaller salon or 
general room, which also serves the purpose of 
smoking-room, and is much affected by the male 
members of the family. Out of this we step into 
the salon proper, a many-windowed room of 



HOME LIFE IN FLATS 25 

spacious dimensions, and from thence into 
another of no less ample size, which is the 
dining-room. This room will have a capacity 
designed for the entertainment, with comfort, of 
as many as forty guests. A large serving-room 
or pantry separates the dining-room from the 
kitchen, and in this apartment, which is propor- 
tionately large, the whole of the dining-table 
equipage is stored. A corridor, which avoids the 
kitchen, leads to the barnevaerelse (nursery) and 
the bedrooms beyond, and the servants' rooms 
have their separate entrance from the back stairs. 

In all the more modern flats, bathrooms are 
provided, and where they are wanting, portable 
baths or the numerous bathing establishments of 
the towns meet the deficiency. 

The bedrooms are furnished with wooden 
bedsteads, and the bed furniture is certainly 
calculated to repel the severest Arctic cold. 
The spring-and-hair mattress is overlaid by a 
substantial feather mattress, and the sheets, with 
a thick single blanket are topped by a heavy 
eider-down quilt. Then every room has, of 
course, its stove for almost continual winter use, 
wherein wood or coal, or coke, is burned. In the 
kitchen, gas-stoves are often used in an auxiliary 
capacity to the open range for cooking purposes. 

Electric-lighting, which in Norway is so cheap 



26 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

that even the labourers of the town avail them- 
selves of it, is the rule in the flat, as are also 
telephones and electric communications. The 
living rooms are cosily, not to say luxuriously 
furnished — with a tendency to the ''Empire" in 
style ; and there is always a large supply of 
flowers in bloom, and palms, at the windows and 
distributed throughout the rooms. This love of 
the fostering of flowers (far more in evidence in 
the towns than among the peasantry) is quite a 
passion in urban Norway, and, contrary to British 
convictions as to the baleful effects of indoor 
plants on the health, roses in a great many 
varieties are always to be seen in profusion at 
the windows during the winter months, to be 
replaced in the spring by a large display of 
tulips, hyacinths, and other flowers of the bulb 
species. The Norwegian has a great liking for 
oil paintings, of which the walls of his rooms 
bear ample witness. Water-colours do not 
appeal to him, and are seldom in evidence. 

Floors, as a rule, are carpeted throughout the 
living rooms, and fur and other rugs are also 
much in use for supplementary purposes. Nor- 
wegian windows are of the usual ** opening out " 
or casement kind, and during severe spells of 
cold have duplicate frames fitted from within, 
between which and the window proper cotton- 



HOME LIFE IN FLATS 27 

wool is laid. The carpets are brushed, and bare 
places and carpetless floors washed daily, with a 
general " house clean '' before Christmas, Easter, 
and Whitsuntide. In summer all carpets and 
heavy curtains are removed. The washing of 
the family linen is carried out by the servant, 
with or without extra help, and the drying is 
done in a very extensive loft, which also serves 
as a sort of well-ordered ''lumber-room." 

The day begins with Kaffe og Kager (coffee 
and cakes), which are brought to the bedside by 
the maid — who, in winter, has previously made a 
fire in the stove. Breakfast is served at nine or 
half-past, and consists of coffee, bread-and-butter, 
boiled or fried eggs and bacon, or ham. Heavy 
meat breakfasts are not the vogue in Norway. 
Paterfamilias then goes off to his office (in many 
cases it adjoins the salon), his son to his parti- 
cular vocation, and his daughters, if they are 
grown up, assist their mother in the lighter duties 
of the house — dusting the furniture, seeing to 
the plants, and in many ways making themselves 
generally useful. All musical practice is also 
done about this time. 

Household matters are under the direct per- 
sonal supervision of the mother. She sees to 
the ** buying in" of all the necessaries, either in 
person or through the telephone, but she will not 



28 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

fail to visit the butcher and satisfy herself on the 
questions of quality, price, and weight. The acts of 
visitation and chaffering in winter are attended with 
less physical discomfort in Norway than in Eng- 
land, for the Norwegian kjobmand (shop-keeper) 
always keeps his fires going in the shop, and 
to enter and leave his premises without closing the 
door is a gaucherie which is not often committed. 

By twelve o'clock materfamilias will have com- 
pleted all her arrangements for the day, and with 
her daughters is prepared to receive visitors. The 
latter call (preferably on Sundays) between 12 and 
2 P.M., and are always offered wine and cakes — 
the ladies of the house waiting upon the gentlemen. 

There are no cold dinners in Norway. That 
meal is served at 2 p.m., and consists as a rule 
of soup, fish, a hot dish, sweets, and cheese, 
with a red wine, or beer, as a beverage. It is im- 
mediately followed by coffee with cream, and 
cakes, which are served in the drawing-room. 

At half-past five a light tea is indulged in, and 
later on (at 8.30) aftensmad (supper) is served. 
The latter generally includes one hot dish with a 
variety of side dishes, and of course cheese ; and 
milk, tea, or beer is drunk. Wine and some 
fruit are in evidence at about 10 o'clock ; and 
between 11.30 and 12 (for the townsman is 
always a late bird) the family retire to rest. 



CHAPTER IV 

CHILDREN, AND THEIR EDUCATION 

IT has been popularly conceded that, next 
to Japan, Norway is par excellence the 
children's paradise. Right up to the very 
day of the Confirmation ceremony the boy's life 
is one continuous round of riotous frolic. In 
winter time the rivers, lakes, and frozen seas 
swarm with him on skates, or on skis and hand- 
sleighs, flying down the narrow streets of his hilly 
town, to the terror of the elderly and obese. 
In summer he is in boats all over the neigh- 
bouring fjords, fishing, shooting, swimming, and 
in manifold other ways risking his life, as the 
death-column of the local paper frequently attests. 
But his favourite place of rendezvous in all 
seasons, out of school hours, is the public side- 
walk. There he is always to be seen at his 
best, or worst, as the passing grown-up may be 
prompted to enter judgment for or against him. 
Not that he cares in the least what anyone may 
think of him and his ways. For he is having 
the one great fling of his existence, and he is 

39 



so HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

going to make the most of it while he can. Then 
on the day before mentioned, as though he had 
been exorcised by some malign fairy's wand, he 
lapses into a sober, almost depressing, quietude 
of demeanour that practically obtains throughout 
his life. The same applies to his little sister, 
who is not one whit less noisy and venturesome 
than her brother ; indeed, in the opinion of the 
native grown-up, she is infinitely worse. Yet 
there is this difference to be noted as an after- 
result of the ceremony which compels her to put 
her hair up and her skirts down : though 
considerably more subdued, as in the nature of 
things Norwegian she is bound to be, she is 
latently, as it were, the same bright, joyous, 
romantic creature, with the frank, open expres- 
sion and winning smile that constitute her espe- 
cial charm. For which reason I have put her 
by — even as children set apart the things that 
are sweet — for separate and exclusive dealing. 
Among the peasantry the fairy's wand would 
seem to have had a more blighting effect on 
both sexes. The boy is, as often as not, trans- 
formed into a confirmed lout, and his sister into 
a stolid prig — with a priggishness, however, that 
will not be maintained for one second beyond the 
absolute needs of the occasion. 

Who is there that has not been impressed on 



CHILDREN, THEIR EDUCATION 31 

his first landing in Norway by the sight of these 
tumultuous swarms of children at play? They 
monopolize the side-walks as though to the pre- 
emption born, and always with that conscious 
air as of the town being wholly and solely theirs 
— which it virtually is, and the mere grown-ups 
so many hard-working stay-at-homes, designed 
by Providence for their special edification and 
patronage — which they actually are ; and the 
clattering sound of their myriad feet, and their 
loud ringing laughter continue throughout the 
live-long day, until the eight o'clock curfew bell 
sends them scurrying off into their homes. It 
is good to be always on easy terms with them. 
They are quick to appreciate sympathy, and to 
reward it in their many pretty and innocent ways. 
Are you fond of flowers ? You will be presented 
with bouquets and wreaths of bloom on the most 
unexpected occasions. Have you, in an un- 
guarded moment, confessed to a furtive regard 
for sweets ? You may be stopped at any moment 
in the public street by a tiny hand offering you 
some variegated and sticky form of confection. 
These little people are not lightly to be con- 
temned, and it would be a rash man indeed who 
would venture to draw down upon himself the 
vials of their puny wrath. They are past-masters 
in the art of booing and the pibe concert (a 



32 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

species of whistling concerto, tutti, outside your 
windows of nights), and I have even known of 
a case of a man of the genus irritabile who had 
to sell up his house and home and vacate a town 
which their implacable attentions had rendered 
uninhabitable. Have a care as to that. You 
will get no sympathy from the parents should 
you present your grievances to them, for they 
will know that you are only as one in a million, 
who has wantonly brought it all upon himself 
Nor will it do to apply to the nearest policeman 
for redress. He will probably not go out of his 
way to catch the delinquents — and couldn't if he 
tried. Next to a dog they are the most faithful 
and affectionate of friends a lonely man could 
possibly possess. They will run your errands, 
row your boat, carry your fishing tackle and gun, 
and impart exclusive information, all in a dilet- 
tante, patronizing way (for you must remember 
they are your equals) that is very charming, if 
at times embarrassing. But before they will do 
all this they must know that you are truly one 
of themselves, and that you see and judge affairs 
as they do, otherwise you will have no spell to 
conjure them with, and they will rank you with 
their own country-men grown-ups, who simply 
look upon the small boy and girl as something 
beyond, or beneath their purview. It is this 



CHILDREN, THEIR EDUCATION zz 

kindly and complaisant indifference of the parents 
that attracts him to the sympathizing and fully- 
grown stranger. His little sister, less demon- 
strative in her advances, tacitly concurs in all 
he may say or do — but from a more respectful 
distance. This freemasonry of affection has 
mysterious and far-reaching ramifications, ex- 
tending through their parents and acquaintances 
even to distant towns, where you will be plea- 
surably astonished to find your paths made as 
easy by their silent good offices as though you 
had been armed with a governmental passport. 
They will never forget you, and should the day 
ever dawn when your destinies take you far 
away from their shores, they will be found in 
little sorrowful groups on railway platforms, piers, 
and even on distant promontories, waving their 
\di.s>tfarvels to the foreign grown-up who always 
saw, and appreciated, things from tkeir point 
of view. 

To look at the worthy Herr Grosserer, spec- 
tacled, portly, dignified, and so very correct in 
every particular, you could never bring the mind's 
eye to see him posting along on skates, skis, 
hand-sleighs, or any other contrivance designed 
for slippery surfaces ; and to picture him in the 
act of waging bloody war upon the common 
enemy, the gade gut, or street arab, would cor- 
3 



34 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

respond with an attempt to square the circle, or 
elucidate a theory of the fourth dimension. Yet 
he has done this thing in his boyhood's days, and 
the dear old Frue Grosserer his wife, dozing over 
her Hardanger embroidery in her saddleback 
chair, has probably yelled her plaudits at him 
from the safer vantage of her snow- fortress. 

The average Norwegian boy of the better class 
is a little gentleman in that word's most natural 
sense, and his small sister is no less qualified to 
assume the title of lady. From a very early 
period they are taught to respect and obey their 
"parents, to be especially considerate and tolerant 
to the servants, and to exhibit deference towards 
their elders. These are the fundamental moral laws 
that govern, or at least regulate, the pandemonium 
of high spirits before referred to. Then follow 
the discipline of the schools, with their inculcation 
of self-respect and love of country, and the 
daily example of tactful and well-bred teachers of 
either sex. 

Their paternal Government takes them in hand 
at a very early period of their lives, and all chil- 
dren of whatsoever religious denomination or sect 
(the few Roman Catholics in the country have 
their separate schools) are compelled to attend 
xho-folke skoky or free schools, at the age of six, 
and to continue in attendance for seven years. 



CHILDREN, THEIR EDUCATION 35 

Of course, parents have the option of sending 
them to the so-called h'oiere (higher) or paying 
schools should they be disposed to do so. In 
these y^//§^ skoler the children are well grounded 
in the " three r's," the grammar of their language, 
the history of the nations — especially that of their 
own country — geography, natural science, religion, 
drawing, part-singing, Swedish gymnastics, and 
the more advanced pupils have the option of 
learning English. The boys are also taught the 
rudiments of practical carpentering, and the girls 
to sew and knit. Upper-form girls may attend the 
skole kjokken (cookery school), where they acquire 
a first-hand knowledge of the kitchen and its 
branches. In addition to one holiday a month, 
they are given three weeks' holiday at Christmas, 
one week at Easter, and in the summer seven 
weeks ; and special reductions — in many cases 
even free fares — are vouchsafed to them over 
railway and steamer routes during the space of 
these vacations. 

Their time of attendance at school averages 
from four to five hours daily. They are provided 
with a warm bath every fortnight, and in the case 
of the poorer children one substantial hot dinner 
daily. In addition to these acts of educational 
grace they are supplied cost free with all their 
books and writing material ; and if the school 



36 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

should be in the neighbourhood of the sea they 
are frequently taken out to bathe, and specially 
taught how to save life under circumstances of 
drowning. Particular attention is paid to the 
cleanliness and general tidiness of the little ones, 
and it is the duty of the schoolmistress to call on 
recalcitrant parents and administer a rousing 
homily to them on the peculiar virtues of soap 
when combined with water, a duty which is not 
infrequently attended with some amount of 
personal risk. Any neglect to send their children 
to school is visited on the parents by repeated 
fines, and even imprisonment. 

Volumes would be required to deal exhaus- 
tively with the practical methods of teaching in 
force in these ideal folke skoler, all of which have 
been designed with the one object of affording 
the least possible excuse for shiftless amateurism 
in that stern after- struggle for existence with 
which the hard conditions of a poor country con- 
front its youth. The well-designed, almost 
palatial /o/^e skole, its systems and its numerous 
connecting institutions for the benefit of the 
children of the very poor, have long been the 
admiration of foreign visiting Commissions, and 
there are few countries who have not at one time 
or another taken a leaf out of Gamle Norges 
well-considered book. The pity of it all is that 



CHILDREN, THEIR EDUCATION 37 

so much of these moneys should be expended for 
the benefit of other lands ; yet in this connection, 
and on the personal initiative of a democratic and 
popular king, serious efforts are at present being 
made to check, by better home inducements, the 
flow of emigration, which is so deterrent to all 
national progress. 

The hoiere or middel schools are no less 
renowned for their systems of teaching. Indeed 
I have frequently heard Germans extol them 
to the disadvantage of their own admirable 
institutions. They are certainly ridiculously 
cheap. The curriculum includes and exceeds 
that of the folke skole. Latin and Greek are 
optional, but English, German, and French are 
a special feature, the first two languages being 
compulsory ; and it should be noted that these 
idioms must be written and spoken with the 
necessary degree of fluency for all practical 
purposes of life. Thorough is the word which 
the Norwegian, equally with his German brother, 
has ever in mind, and it remains with him 
throughout his career, as some of the greatest 
feats of the engineering world bear ample 
witness. 

The boys and girls of the higher schools 
are given the same holidays as those of the 
folke skole, and at sixteen years of age they 



38 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

take their exam. Having passed the latter, 
they enter either a mercantile academy or a 
technical school, or, if they are inclined to law, 
medicine, or theology, they can remain on 
another three years at the school and matricu- 
late (Artium) for the University — a matriculation, 
by the way, which is considered to be far more 
difficult of acquirement than that for our own 
Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Finally, 
and as a sort of cap-stone to this fund of 
theoretical and practical teaching, the young 
man of the better class is sent to Germany, 
England, or France to study their languages 
and acquire for himself some better general 
knowledge of affairs. 



CHAPTER V 

NORWEGIAN WOMEN 

THE first among the women of European 
nations to secure her 'Wote," and her seat 
in Parliament, the recognized authority 
in all social movements directly affecting the 
home life, and the unafraid champion of her 
undoubted right to have a look in wherever 
the privileges of her sex are likely to be 
endangered (you will even find her patrolling 
the streets of Christianssand as a duly sworn-in 
and uniformed "bobby"), the Norwegian woman 
merits some special degree of attention. How 
has she managed to accomplish all this, and 
still remain so irritatingly feminine, so aggres- 
sively womanly? For she is self-abnegatory 
to an extent that cannot appeal to the '* man- 
hood" of her more militant sisters in other 
lands. She will admit with full-eyed candour 
that for her the trang towards motherhood and 
the home is of the very essence of her being ; 
yet, failing the attainment of those ends, she 
will make the best use of her many accomplish- 

39 



40 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

ments to shift for herself, trusting to her natural 
and acquired philosophy to maintain a young 
heart, true-fast friends, and, firm in the faith 
of her fathers, to take her departure in peace. 
What, then, is the source of this power, or 
rather sweet suasion, which has given her 
practically all she wants of communal authority 
to regulate the proceedings of her more self- 
sufficient brother ? Of nature she is venturesome 
and courageous to an unusual extent. To her 
the true Viking spirit, with its love of derring-do 
and its power of stoical endurance, would seem 
to have been transmitted in all its pristine 
virility. In the list of toboggan casualties re- 
sulting from the break-neck descents of her 
Holmenkollen gorges, her name appears oftener 
than that of her less risk-taking brother. On 
ski she will accompany and equal him in pluck 
and endurance in the wildest of wild-cat mountain 
tours. She can manoeuvre a sail-boat like a 
pilot, swim like her native eider-duck, roam 
her rugged uplands with all the dogged per- 
tinacity of a professional tramp ; and withal 
she will remain to you of womanly women a 
very woman. It is provoking (as it is of the 
very nature of that despised cult to ruffle our 
sense of modernity), but it is nevertheless 
lamentably true. The British tourist of the 



NORWEGIAN WOMEN 41 

"/superior 'Arry" type (and we get him on 
o^r'casion), who, pipe in mouth, contemplates her 
V ith insular patronage as she patiently attends 
tC his requirements at the post-office, telegraph 
s.,>.tion, or apothecary's shop, has no conception 
A the amount of information there is stored 
in that little head. To him she is merely a 
telephone-girl, or a shop-girl, and nothing more 
— certainly not a lady, or she wouldn't be there, 
don't-ye-know ? To be sure he will exhibit 
some degree of pleasurable surprise when she 
laughingly ignores his English- Dano- Norsk 
conversation book and addresses him in fluent 
English ; and to that extent, and her faculty 
of being able to look him straight in the eyes 
as a sister may her brother, is she a '' rippin' 
good sort and all that, what?" But he would 
never dream that she could discuss with him 
(which he couldn't do for the life of him) the 
several merits of Tolstoi, Dickens, and Ibsen, 
or the ethics of citizenship, or even the classifica- 
tion of polygons. Nor would it occur to him 
that she was qualified by breeding and education 
to take her place among the best circles his 
country can boast — in other words, that she 
was every inch a little lady, and knew how to 
behave herself " as sich." But in these matters 
I fear he is of the category of the Ancients, who, 



42 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

we are informed, on the authority of an AmericaxI 
humorist, were justly renowned for what the^ 
didnt know. i 

Women — French women bien entendu — wii. 
say that she does not know how to "do hor 
hair." But this is a libel. Her Greuze-lik' 
features, with that charm which a not too regular 
profile alone can impart, is not adapted to a 
restraining form of coiffure. And she knows it. 
That is all. She might with more truth retort! 
(which she wouldn't do) that she has no use for 
powder puff, rouge pot, a six-inch waist, and a 
four- inch boot heel, and yet remain a dangerously 
fascinating little personality. 

I repeat she might say this, but she wouldn't ; 
for the retort brutal does not enter into the 
curriculum of her studies. If her brother is 
partial to English snips and tweeds, her inclina- 
tions would seem to be rather in the direction of 
German confection in dress. I say ** would 
seem " advisedly, for I believe this is a matter 
less of choice than owing to the fact that the 
country is overrun by German commercials with 
their easier methods for the opening up of 
accounts — and settling them. But such as she 
is obliged to wear she certainly knows how to 
put on. The pitchfork process so often seen 
among our lower middle classes does not com- 



NORWEGIAN WOMEN 43 

"/lend itself to her sense of appearance, and she 

^^r always neatly frocked, booted, and gloved ; 

^ nd never is the eye offended by the sight of 
Sartially hooked blouses and the lack of una- 

^'iiimity between the bottom of the latter and the 
top of the skirt, a state of things which lengthy 
observation has led me to believe has long been 
a vexed question for equitable adjustment. 

All this takes us no nearer to the question I 
have propounded as to the reason of the Nor- 
wegian woman's influence in domains which 
were formerly considered to be the special 
preserves of her male country-man. Possibly 
the answer may lie in the fact that in the 
interval from the day when she and he enter 
the higher school together until their ascent of 
the University steps, she has succeeded in exer- 
cising that better influence over him (has eradi- 
cated, as it were, certain age-old prejudices) which 
her greater tact, initiative, and wit was bound 
to do. He has been brought to consider in his 
matter-of-fact dull way that there was after all 
something in her. Away from the desk their 
nine years of school life has been one sustained 
period of romp, confidential chat, summer walks, 
ski and sleigh excursions, and boating trips 
amidst the most romantic surroundings imagin- 
able, and she is romantic to a degree, though 



44 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

she will certainly not admit it. They havt^ 
always been as free to come and go as th : • 
adagial bee in a lilac tree. In short they have, 
as with the American youth (though she is fc ^• 
less exacting than the American girl), estab^ 
lished a sort of camaraderie that has more than^ 
probably made for those future concessions on 
the suffrage question which she of her very 
nature was bound to crave. He may have been 
a little sceptical at first as to the wisdom of 
such a policy. She was not; and through her 
Collettes, Hansteens, Gina Krogs, and other 
doughty champions of her rights he was given 
no rest until for very peace and quiet's sake he 
good humouredly consented. And now he has 
both the peace and the quietude, and as a sort 
of return for his complaisance, I am not so 
certain but that she doesn't spoil him most out- 
rageously at times — possibly with a view to 
further concessions. One never knows what is 
at the back of that wise little head.^ 

It is worth while following her through some 
of the stages of her educational experiences if 
only to test my contention, eschewing all 

^ On Saturday, 25 February, 191 1, the Norwegian Government 
submitted a Bill entitling women to be appointed to all the 
offices of State, excepting only military, diplomatic, and clerical 
posts. Another Bill was submitted entitling women to act as 
trustees. 



Years' Teaching 


50 kroner.^ 


if y> 


. 70 »» 


>> »> 


.95 „ 


th„ „ 


. 145 n 


>» 9i 


. 240 „ 



NORWEGIAN WOMEN 45 

technical details of class-work as pertaining more 
to the province of visiting commissions. 

She goes to school, as previously mentioned, 
after the attainment of her sixth year, paying 
for her 

First 

2nd and 3rd 

4th 

5th, 6th, 7th & 8th „ 

9th 

If more children of the same parents attend 
there is a considerable reduction in the above 
fees. During her first year, which commences 
on September i, her attendance is from ten to 
half-past twelve, with ten minutes' interval for 
play — when the schoolrooms are given a thorough 
airing. At the school she can obtain for a penny 
her cup of chocolate wherewith to enjoy her 
home-made sandwiches ; the latter usually con- 
sisting oi gjed ost (goats' cheese), a substance that 
looks uncommonly like ordinary brown soap, and 
might taste like a sweeter variety of that abluent 
— though as a matter of fact its appetizing and 
sustaining qualities are notoriously good, and it 
is practically the national cheese among the many 
Norwegian cheeses. At home during the after- 

1 A krone is about is. i Jd. 



46 HOME LIFE TN NORWAY 

noon she will devote a couple of hours to the 
preparation of her lessons for the following day. 
From her second to the end of her fifth year's 
attendance her hours are from nine to half-past 
twelve, and she is taught, as during her first year, 
all those subjects pertaining to the folke skole 
curriculum. At the end of the fifth year, her 
preparatory schooling being finished, she enters 
the Middelskole stage, and is taught German, and 
in the seventh year, when the hours have been 
prolonged from nine to two, she *' takes on" 
English, and is thoroughly initiated into the 
grammatical, compositional, and conversational 
idiosyncrasies of that language. She is now 
rapidly approaching the years of her discretion, 
and she improves the occasion by private lessons 
in music and dancing ; for, like all Scandinavians, 
she is passionately devoted to the '* light fantastic " 
art. In winter she skates, toboggans, or goes on 
ski, and in the summer is much in evidence at 
play ; or she may have a preference for long 
walks ; but whatever form her relaxation may 
take she is required to be at home by eight 
o'clock. In many of the larger towns a church 
bell is tolled at eight with that particular object. 
There is a library attached to the school, from 
whence and for a penny a month she may take 
English, German, or other books of an innocuous 



NORWEGIAN WOMEN 47 

kind once a week, keeping them if necessary for 
a fortnight ; for she is ever a voracious reader. 
The examinations take place in the beginning of 
June and continue throughout that month, when 
a sort of fete is held for the children on July i, 
at which the Herr Rektor makes them an edifying 
speech and presents them with their certificates 
of proficiency. Before she can take her Middel- 
skole exam., however, she must pay to the 
examining censors a fee of 20 kroner. The 
first portion of this inquisition is in writing, and 
includes Norwegian, English, German,and mathe- 
matics ; and after an interval of a week she 
undergoes a viva voce examination, usually in 
three or four subjects, as for instance Norwegian, 
geography, English, and mathematics, and she 
is given two days to prepare for each. She has 
no eksamen in gymnastiky although her brother 
has. 

During the first years of her school life she 
sits beside the other boys, but even at the age 
of twelve a boy who has not ** behaved " may be 
placed beside her, as a sort of '' horrible warning," 
I suppose, et pour encourager les autres. When 
about fifteen she prepares for her confirmation, 
attending at the praest's (a Lutheran minister of 
the Norwegian Established Church) twice a week, 
and for a preparatory period of six months. She 



48 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

is then confirmed at the church, and is presented 
by her friends and relations with a number of 
durable presents to remind her in future years of 
the solemnity of that day's proceedings. 

Her Middelskole examination over, she is at 
liberty to enter a Handelsgymnasium for a com- 
mercial training, from whence she takes up a 
salaried position in a business office. Or she 
may enter the service of the State in a telegraph, 
telephone, or post-office. If she decides for the 
telephone, she is provided with three months' free 
tuition, when she may vicariate at 3 Jd. an hour for 
a few years until she gets her official appointment 
with a salary of from ;^3, 7s. 6d. to ^5 a month, 
for an attendance of eight hours daily. The 
foregoing also applies to the telegraph service 
and the post-office, except that in the former she 
is given six months' gratis teaching, and her pay 
in both these branches is better. When it is 
remembered that every little shop or private 
house of any consequence at all in Norway had 
its telephone before their use was even contem- 
plated by London houses of repute, and that the 
greater part of the ordinary business of the former 
country is conducted through the telephone or by 
wire, it must be admitted that the life of the 
Norwegian telephone and telegraph girl is not a 
particularly roseate one. The irregular working 




CHURCHWARDEN, VI K. SHOWING OFFKRTORY BAG, WITH HELL 
ATTACHED TO AWAKEN SLEEPERS 



NORWEGIAN WOMEN 49 

intervals, with their attendant uncertainty of meal 
hours, together with the constant strain on the 
attention, is often too much for even her iron 
constitution. Nervousness is apt to supervene, 
and she is frequently obliged to relinquish her 
place to " a different girl again,^' and at a com- 
paratively early period of her life. ** I have been 
one myself/' writes one of them, now happily 
married and beyond the worries of office, *' and 
I will advise every girl never to become one." 
A subscription of four or five kroner a month is 
paid into a pensions kasse, and if she is able to 
hold out until between fifty and sixty years of 
age she is pensioned off. When her home is not 
in the town she usually lives at dipensionat. 

There are, however, other alternatives for 
making a living after she has left the middelskole. 
She may enter a seminarium, and after three 
years' training qualify as a teacher. There are 
several of these institutions on a free-teaching 
basis in Norway, but none, strange to say, in the 
metropolis. In Christiania she must pay a yearly 
fee of 250 kroner, but a ''student''' need only 
remain for one year. A period of vikariering 
(vicariating) then follows for some years, at a 
pay of 3|d. an hour, until she has secured an 
appointment. 

She may also choose to pass into the gym- 
4 



50 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

nasium, remaining there for three years, and 
take her degree artium for the University. 
Where these institutions are not State-supported 
she will have to pay an annual fee of 250 kroner. 
Here she is treated as a grown-up and is thrown 
much into the society of her fellow-pupils of the 
other sex. The gymnasium has a forening, or 
association, whereof the pupils meet every 
Saturday and speechify and discuss to their 
hearts' content on the popular topics of the day, 
winding up the proceedings with a dance, as a 
sort of fitting commentary, presumably, on the 
futility of all public discussion. Once a year 
they give a formal ball, and during the Christmas 
holidays they have private theatricals, whereat 
farces of the ** Charley's Aunt" genre are much 
to the fore. The gymnastik hall is given to 
them gratis for their meetings. The examination 
for artium is in its general scheme much on the 
lines as that for the middelskole eksamen, though 
of course it is a much more serious affair, in- 
cluding, as it does, a little of Cicero, Livius, 
Tacitus, and others. Her fee to the censors is 
40 kroner, though this is not pressed for should 
she for special reasons petition for a free examin- 
ation. Having taken her artium, on July i she 
will be immatrikulert at the University on Sep- 
tember 2 : though this is not necessary ; but in 



NORWEGIAN WOMEN 51 

that event she would not be academicus. The 
proper title of the Norwegian University is ""Det 
Kongelige Fredriks Universtety It was founded 
on September 2, 181 1, and will therefore cele- 
brate its centennial jubilee in this year of grace 
1911. 

Following the progress of our little heroine we 
arrive at that stage when, having selected her 
professor zsprivat praeceptor to see her through 
all the routine of the University, she attends at 
noon on immatrikulering day clad in white or 
black, and with her parents, fellow new students, 
and old students who have celebrated their 
twenty-five, forty, and fifty years' jubilee as 
students, takes her seat in the University fest 
hal. Here the Herr Rektor will address her 
generally on her duties as akademiker and 
present her with the freedom of the University. 
In the evening the studenter-samfundet (Students' 
Society) gives a fete in honour of the russen, or 
undergraduates, a rather boisterous affair in its 
way, during which speeches and songs follow 
one another interminably. ''H.M. Grisen (His 
Majesty the Pig),'* the mythical patron of the 
University, is carried in, and in the guise of a 
golden porker welcomes her and her fellow- 
students to the University. At midnight she 
takes her departure, a full-fledged russen. There 



52 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

is an average yearly attendance of 500 new 
students, of which number 100 are girls. Many 
of the students of both sexes of course do not 
remain on at their alma mater, preferring, as 
they often do, to go in for a shorter cut to wage- 
earning, and they will therefore elect to enter the 
technical school or the military school, or an 
office, or, as is often the case with girls, to 
become a resident governess. In the last 
capacity the pay is usually 20 kroner a 
month, and her position in the house is in 
every respect that of a lady, an equal, and one 
of the family. 

There are five faculties at the University: 
Teologiske fakultet^ juridiske fakultet^ mede- 
cinske, historisk-filosofiske, and matematisk- 
videnskahlige fakulteter — terms which explain 
themselves. Before our friend can take up one 
of these fakulteter she must pass her examina- 
tion (two semester terms) in filosofi — please to 
observe the phonetic advantages of Norwegian 
orthography. She inscribes her name in a 
protokol, and duly notifies the Dekanus of her 
choice. The examination is free, but she will 
have to pay another censorial fee of 40 kroner 
unless the akademiske kollegium, consisting of the 
Rektor and four professors, decides, on petition, 
to waive its payment. She then attends lectures 



NORWEGIAN WOMEN 53 

four or five times a week for each subject. The 
library and reading room of the University, the 
Botanical garden, and the numerous samlinger 
(meetings) are freely at her disposition. There 
are sQvtvdXforeninger of students. The students' 
society has its meetings every Saturday for 
speech-making and discussion, and the Temper- 
ance, Religious and Choral Societies of the 
students have also their weekly meetings. In 
time she may secure one of the many stipends 
from the University bequests, amounting to 300 
kroner or 400 kroner a year, and she is quite at 
liberty at any time to earn a living by giving 
private lessons in German, English, Latin, etc., 
for which she is usually paid at the rate of a 
kroner an hour. 

She is now in the heyday of the great ** one 
time" of her life. She and her fellow male 
students are always on the very best of terms, 
and their periods of study are relieved by frequent 
walks together, ski tours to Nordmarken, listen- 
ing to the band in the Royal Park, toboganning 
on the Frognersaeter, skating, boating, concerts, 
lawn tennis, theatres, balls, and possibly (though 
I am not qualified to judge academically) some 
small degree of flirting. She may, however, prefer 
to sit quietly at home and read up for the sterner 
problem of ** bread and butter and how to pro- 



54 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

vide it," and if she has no home in the town she 
must put up with a pensionat, or a private 
family, paying 60 kroner or 70 kroner a 
month for her upkeep. She has two semesters 
a year with examination, from September 
15 until Christmas, and from January 15 to 
June 15. 

Finally there is the great summer meeting of 
the year — the crowning period of her joyous 
academical life. This generally takes place at 
some place of national interest, as E ids wold, for 
instance, and lasts for four days. At these meet- 
ings instructive papers are read and discussed. 
A substantial reduction in railway and steamboat 
fares is accorded her, and during her four days' 
stay at the place of meeting she is housed, fed, 
and entertained for an inclusive fee of 1 2 kroner. 
In the afternoon excursions are made to local 
places of historical or scenic interest, followed 
by an al fresco meal amid sylvan surroundings. 
These meetings are in a sense Scandinavian, if 
not European, and are attended by Danes, 
Swedes, and Finns, though English and other 
nationalities are always cordially welcomed. 
There are usually about a hundred women 
students present, and as many male students, 
besides clergy and professors, and a genial spirit 
of camaraderie obtains throughout the entire 



NORWEGIAN WOMEN 55 

function. Verily is it the one great day of all 
our little friend's days ; for here she will have 
the opportunity of making acquaintances which, 
as things often turn out, may lead to the one 
great friendship of her life. 



CHAPTER VI 



FOOD 



NORWEGIAN food will not appeal to the 
Britisher who objects to the German 
kitchen and the " greasy kickshaws " of 
Continentals in general. The Continental, how- 
ever, likes it, and the German in particular, for 
its tendencies are all in the direction of the 
lubricious bakemeats of das grosse Vaterland, 
My own opinion about it is that it is admirably 
adapted for the premature formation of adipose 
tissue. That is to say, it is less strength-giving 
than nourishing. Yet if indulged in with 
moderation, say no more than three times a day, 
and from dishes of your own choosing, it is as 
wholesome and well-tasting a regimen as one can 
possibly wish to have. I am here alluding, of 
course, to the food of the towns. That of the 
cereal-eating peasantry is quite another matter, 
and should not be taken into general account in 
this treatise. The Norwegian's opinion about 
our food and its preparation is pretty much on 
the lines of most foreign views on the subject. 



57 



58 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

It is not flattering to our pride of practicalness. 
Yet he will admit that as a nation we are above 
all things practical. He makes an exception, 
however, in the case of our upper middle class 
cookery, which he says is tolerable enough, if 
a little wasteful and watery, but that anything 
beneath that class, in the food line, is beneath 
contempt. Thus the Norwegian, and he is a 
good hand at the noble art of hitting back. He 
is tolerant and non-disputatious to a degree in 
the presence of the foreigner, but there are limits 
even to his complaisance, and audible comments 
on his buttery sauces or the glimpse of a tin of 
" Keating " will often as not (and very reason- 
ably) send him flying over the line ; and then 
you must read him in the vernacular of his 
patriotic journals to appreciate your own true 
nothingness and the vituperative powers of the 
Dano-Norsk idiom. Therefore must I proceed 
very cautiously, and with some amount of 
diffidence ; for the way is thorn-full and at times 
exceeding rough. 

I take it that in this matter of food taste, or 
taste in food, the inherited trend of the individual 
is the main point governing the dispute. From 
time immemorial my forebears have been of the 
flesh-eaters most fleshly, and they have un- 
doubtedly transmitted their carnivorous pre- 



FOOD 59 

judices to me. In Norway I have rebelled 
against this hereditary instinct, and for years 
have subsisted among the upland peasantry on 
a diet of fresh and sour milk, eggs, oatmeal por- 
ridge, flat bread and potatoes, with an occasional 
Sunday reversion to flesh in the form of soup 
from salted beef or mutton ; and I throve and 
waxed exceeding fat, though not particularly 
tough, thereon. But the meat hunger was 
always upon me, and I longed beyond all 
description for the chop and the steak-and-onions 
and the cut from the joints which were not. 
Therefore when I have gone into the towns and 
put up at the cosy little privat hotels, with which 
Norway abounds, I have telephoned my coming 
in advance, together with the nature and pre- 
paration of the fresh meats which I would expect 
to find ready for the table on my arrival. And 
never did meat taste so deliciously, or appear 
to me to be so strength-imparting, as on those 
shameful occasions of moral lapse. Certainly 
the steak, and the chop, contained no fat to 
speak of, and the leg of mutton was no larger 
than that of a Southdown lamb, but then the 
chop and the leg were of the mountain, and the 
steak was home-bred and killed, which were 
things to conjure with so far as the appetite was 
concerned. 



6o HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

Continuing in my downward course, like the 
drunkard of the tract, I have, then, for a period 
of fourteen days Hved, Hterally speaking, on the 
fat of the town, absorbing every diurnal meal, its 
courses and its side-dishes, without exception or 
demur, from the early morning kaffe og kager 
to the 10.30 p.m. wine and fruit; and it was all 
very delightful, if very various, while it lasted. 
But it produced the inevitable reaction ; and I 
have fled post-haste out to my mountain fast- 
nesses for my eggs, and my milk, and my 
porridge, and my potatoes : there to revel in 
them (eschewing all meats, salt or otherwise) 
until the old hereditary gnawing sent me back 
into town again for that miserable steak-and- 
onions and the bottle of bok ol — which we call 
stout. 

All of which foregoing is of the nature of a 
very tactful allegory designed to meet the con- 
victions of meat-eaters and vegetarians alike, 
without trespassing unduly on the feelings of my 
worthy old friend the Herr Grosserer. 

Therefore is the Norwegian, in his Inclination 
towards the things that are fatty, hereditarily 
correct ; and he is, moreover, correct In his con- 
tention that fats in Arctic countries are indispen- 
sable for human food. But he has no more 
right to point the finger of scorn (which he 



FOOD 6 1 

hardly ever does) at my blue-rare steak than 
have I to sneer (which I never do) when at 
Hammerfest he, in the person of a fisherman, 
drinks me ** skaal " in a glass of cod-liver oil. 

But to the Britisher who elects to reside in 
Norway there is always a middle course open — 
the easiest course in the world. He has only to 
state what he really wants (in English or in 
German) in the matter of the meat and vege- 
tables, and their cooking, and he will be catered 
for at hotel or pensionat with unfailing patience 
and good temper. But he must exercise a 
similar degree of forbearance when tabulating 
his requirements or they will not materialize. 
In Norway, and especially peasant Norway, 
where time is really of no particular consequence, 
patience is the one primal virtue, and the father, 
as it were, of all the others. Any ebullition of 
temper is considered the worst possible form, 
and a person so indulging is noted as vond 
(angry) — a term usually applied to a dog or any 
other animal of uncertain disposition. To be 
known as snil (kind), on the other hand, is a 
safe passport to the Norwegian's good graces, 
always provided that you are not for snil (too 
kind) or alt for snil (altogether too kind) — terms 
usually considered to be more referable to a fool, 
in the comparative and superlative. 



62 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

Most of the better-class hotels in Norway 
have already anticipated the Britisher's con- 
servatism on the food question, and have pro- 
vided for him accordingly ; and should he have 
his own house or flat, he will find that his cook 
is very amenable to be taught plain English 
cooking. Then, after a friendly intimidation of 
the butcher (who has certainly some extra- 
ordinary cross-country methods of jointing meat), 
he will be able, with a little stretch of imagina- 
tion, to fancy he is at his own table in the old 
home across the sea. 

The chief objection which the touring Briton 
has to the food of the country is the scarcity of 
meat and vegetables, and, when met with, the 
questionable and saucey guises in which they are 
presented to him ; and assuming that he is in- 
fallible in his conclusions as to what constitutes 
a reasonable diet, he is undoubtedly in the right. 
With the exception of potatoes, which often form 
the staple of the evening meal, there are prac- 
tically no vegetables (in the British sense of 
their uses) to be found among the peasants of 
the interior. A little cabbage or carrot is occa- 
sionally grown for the purposes of the infrequent 
salt-meat soup ; but I have never seen them, or 
cauliflower, to say nothing of salad or celery, 
served plain as a separate dish, though I have 



FOOD 63 

reason to believe that I have often partaken of 
them without having had the faintest conception 
as to their identity — all inquiry being, from 
reasons of etiquette, strictly barred. So far as 
the peasant is concerned, this general lack of 
green food is absolutely inexcusable, and can be 
only attributed to an ingrained dislike of any- 
thing proximating to luxury. // mange mats il 
ne dine pas applies with peculiar force to him 
and his humble table, though it will probably 
take a few more centuries to awaken him to the 
significance of the bon mot. Though far from 
having reached the degenerate stage, a large and 
varied experience of him has convinced me that, 
to bring him back to his pristine vigour and 
hardihood, the following three requisites are 
worthy of his undivided attention : fresh meat 
and vegetables, a return to his neglected oat- 
meal porridge, and a better ventilation of his 
rooms. And when it is considered that he is 
practically the only raw material of which the 
cult of the towns is formed, the question is less a 
provincial than a national one. 

There is a belief among Englishmen in the 
country that after the first three years' residence 
in Norway the winter cold is borne with less 
equanimity than that of the first period of 
domicile ; and as a reason for this disability it is 



64 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

advanced that the predominance of the white 
foods (fish, pork, veal, etc.), together with the 
spasmodic supply of green-stuffs, is productive of 
that poverty of blood which the abundant beefs 
and muttons and vegetables of his homeland go 
to obviate. Whether or not this be the case I 
must leave to the Herr Doktor and the Herr 
Professor to decide. It has not occurred to me 
from personal observation that the people of the 
towns are any less full-blooded than those of, say 
Germany ; though, as in the case of the latter, 
two-thirds at least of the men one sees about 
town appear to be a great deal fatter than they 
have any right to be, and of a fat, moreover, 
which their own doctors have dubbed bleg fed 
(white fat), which unhealthy condition of obesity 
is seldom met with among beef-fed Englishmen. 
A corpulent Norwegian lady, on the other hand, 
is rather an exception ; and this has given occas- 
sion to the unkind suggestion of their ungallant 
country-man that the Norwegian man was over- 
coddled, over-fed, and entirely spoilt by his self- 
denying sister, to her own physical detriment, 
a libel which has just sufficient truth in it to 
make it all the more libellous. Among the 
peasants (who could certainly not maintain a 
" fat man's club ") there is a far better case for this 
theory of poor food and its resultant poverty of 



FOOD 65 

blood. Blod forgiftning (blood-poisoning) is 
very prevalent with them, especially among 
the husmaend and labourers. Whitlow is a 
common trouble, and any slight scratch or cut 
on the hand in winter is apt to set up a dan- 
gerous inflammation extending to the armpit 
and necessitating severe operations. The per- 
ennial appearance in early spring also of sores 
at the corner of the mouths of the poorer children 
— sores which disappear with the better summer 
food — likewise tells a tale which points its own 
moral. In many of the off-lying valleys fresh 
meat is seldom or never eaten, and the only 
vegetable encouraged is the potato. In these 
places veal will on rare occasions constitute a 
day's meal before it is salted down ; but as the 
calf is frequently killed at an age that is very far 
removed from discretion, its flesh will not, and 
does not, appeal to the townsman or the foreigner. 
The peasant as a rule keeps his cows solely for 
milking and manurial purposes, and the occasional 
supply of veal for salting ; and with the exception 
of a few sheep- breeding districts the latter animal 
is seldom kept for food alone. 

Butter and fresh cream take the place of 
dripping, and enter largely into the scope of 
Norwegian cooking. Butter when fresh and 
good will cost about iid. a pound, and the best 

5 



66 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

cream 9d. a liter. As one moves away into the 
interior fresh butter is less in evidence than is 
margarine, the peasant preferring to sell his 
butter to the towns and purchase his margarine 
at anything under 7d. His tastes are always for 
the things that are not particularly fresh. When 
thirsty he will infinitely prefer a drink of over- 
sour milk to that he may at any time obtain 
direct from his cow, and fresh trout are quickly 
transferred to the salting tub. This applies 
equally to his inclinations in the matter of meat, 
though there are signs of late that he is be- 
ginning to appreciate the flesh that is sweet, and 
the day may yet come when he will eat the game 
with which his forests abound, instead of sending 
it into the towns as a sort of offal for debased 
city taste. 

In the meantime the towns benefit by his 
prejudices in the latter respect. A capercailzie 
may be had for half-a-crown, and black game 
at about the same price a pair. Grouse and 
woodcock average 7d. and lod. respectively. 
Thrushes and blackbirds are sold at about the 
rate of a penny apiece ; but when it comes to 
the lark and the pigeon the Norwegian draws 
the line, sparing the former for its song and the 
latter for ornamental purposes. A hare will cost 
you a kroner (is. ijd.), but a wild rabbit cannot 



FOOD 6^ 

be had for love or money, they, like the English 
daisy, not being indigenous to the country. 

Vegetables are fairly plentiful in the towns, 
and are considered by Norwegians to be dear 
enough. They are certainly much dearer in the 
North than in Southern Norway. Potatoes 
average about 2d. for 3 kilos, cauliflower from 
3d. to 8d. per head. Cabbage, ijd. to 3Jd., and 
carrots about a penny a bundle. Celery, lettuce, 
and rhubarb are to be had in their season, as is 
also karvekaal, which is much used in soups. It 
is a species of wild carraway, and its leaves are 
gathered on hill and field in the early spring, and 
dried for yearly use. It is, in my opinion, far 
superior to spinach when boiled in its native 
freshness and served with poached eggs, and 
as an ingredient in soup its delicate mint-like 
flavour is much appreciated by Scandinavians. 
Its cultivation for export purposes should be 
encouraged, for I am certain that it would be 
appreciated by the British housewife if only as 
an occasional change from the eternal parsley, 
mint, and sage of daily use. 

Fish, in the tin, and fresh from the river or 
sea, is, as might be reasonably expected, cheap 
enough. Soles are not easily to be had, but 
among the numerous other kinds of flat-fish the 
large golden flounder, costing about 6d. each, is 



68 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

much prized. Cod, haddock, and whiting take 
an easy first place as the staple fish food. Live 
cod sells at about 4d. a kilo, and, when salted, at 
about half that price. Silver whiting are often 
retailed at a penny apiece, haddock at 2jd. and 
3Jd. a pound, and fresh mackerel from a penny 
to 3d. apiece, according to size. You can get 
seven large-sized fresh herrings for a penny, and, 
when salted, a fine specimen for a halfpenny. 
Fresh salmon varies very much in price, ranging 
as it does from 8d. to 2s. 3d. a pound, but the 
smoked fish usually maintains its price at about 
lod. a pound. Peasants as a rule prefer to dis- 
pose of their salmon catches in rivers and along 
the coasts to a local company for export, and as 
most of the best rivers are let to Englishmen and 
others, this fish is less in general evidence at table 
than it otherwise might be. Trout fishing in the 
numberless brooks, rivers, and lakes of Norway 
being practically free to one and all, the fish is 
an inexpensive and frequent summer commodity 
in town and country. 

Turbot, for some strange reason, not uncon- 
nected probably with its warty and general 
unlovely appearance, is not a favourite in the 
market. Whether or not it is considered to be 
of the category of the devil-fish, and unclean, I 
cannot say ; but I have a vivid recollection of 



FOOD 69 

inducing fishermen, not so many years ago, to 
give them to me rather than throw them over- 
board, and even at this date they may be had for 
a mere song. There is no accounting for the 
vagaries of a people s taste in such matters. 
Kidneys, for instance, are considered in the light 
of offal, and I have never paid my butcher any- 
thing for them, nor for liver, nor sweetbread. 
Sheeps' heads and brains are anathema, though 
pigs' feet are, in a small way, a marketable com- 
modity. Mushrooms, other than the champignon 
of the bottle, are regarded also with the gravest 
suspicion, and the peasant's aversion to game of 
any kind is notorious. 

Halibut at about 9d. a kilo is much eaten by 
the working classes, as is also ludfisky though 
the latter is likewise much favoured among the 
** upper ten." Indeed, it is as indispensable on 
the table at Christmas Eve as is our turkey or 
plum-pudding. And of all the British-contemned 
dishes of Norway I don't suppose there are any 
that have been so gratuitously abused as the 
harmless, if unnecessary, ludjisk. It is in reality 
dry salt cod which has been soaked for about 
eight days in a lye, or potash, from birchwood, 
and then boiled. It is served up hot, and eaten 
with the usual sauce of melted butter. In its 
cooked state it presents a semi-transparent and 



70 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

gelatinous appearance, and its taste is really not 
at all bad when you have overcome the notion 
that you are dealing with putrid fish — which it 
is not. But the odour which it emits during 
the boiling process, to say nothing of the after- 
smell — a sort of ^' choke-damp " as it were — 
has effectually damned it in the eyes, or rather 
the nose, of the Britisher, and rarely will he 
tolerate its preparation in his kitchen for the use 
of his servants. It is usually retailed at 2d. or 
3d. a pound. In the same category, and from a 
similar exotic point of view, the gammel ost (old 
cheese) may be safely placed ; for it is a com- 
estible that has furnished as much food for 
depreciatory fun as the famous, or infamous, 
Limburger of the American humorist. Yet it is, 
in my opinion, no worse than Roquefort in its 
more advanced period of life. It is merely an 
ordinary cheese, made from ordinary cows' milk, 
and kept for an extraordinary length of time. 
The legend that peasants bury it under , the 
threshold of their doors and keep it there until it 
is impossible for any person to enter the house, 
when it is considered to be ripe, has no founda- 
tion in fact — chiefly because it would never occur 
to a Norwegian peasant to bury it at any time. 
It is a common object on all hotel and pensionat 
tables, and I have yet to learn that its presence 



FOOD 71 

has produced any disruptive effect on the company 
assembled. It is so very easy to be funny at the 
expense of cheeses — of the maturer brands. 

Returning to our fish, it should be mentioned 
that if one Hves near the sea (where everybody 
who is anybody in Norway usually resides) your 
summer supply need cost you no more than the 
time and trouble in getting it. On the more 
populous south and south-east coasts there is 
practically no tide, and very little current to 
speak of. In summer your boat, steam launch, 
or yacht are always to be found floating where 
you left them, and fish abound literally up to your 
very door. I have often, seated in a basket-chair 
on the lawn, within a few yards of the hall door, 
caught all the whiting, flounder, and even cod 
necessary for the day's supply to the household, 
and my average daily take one summer in a 
neighbouring creek, resorted to by fish as a 
feeding ground, was six dozen of all sorts, among 
which haddock and the silver whiting predomi- 
nated : and this within a stoneVthrow of the cliffs, 
in fifteen fathoms of water, and very often without 
once having shifted my ground. 

It will be readily surmised that with so 
bountiful a supply of fish the poor (who are 
never so poor that they cannot possess, or borrow, 
a boat — I have seen second-hand and serviceable 



72 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

prams change hands for six shilHngs) have all the 
fresh fish they want either for the home or for 
sale. Many better-class families residing in good 
fishing districts keep a standing supply of live 
cod in large perforated wooden cases. The 
latter are taken up out of the sea by hand or by 
a winch from their boat-piers, and the fish are 
fed daily until they are required ; and so tame 
and used to the new life do some of the earlier 
lodgers become that I have seen them readily 
swim up and take the food from the hand held 
under the water. When fish is required the 
owner has only to step down to his private pier 
at the end of his garden, haul up his weighted 
box, select his cod and take it out with a hand-net, 
alive and fresh for the table. 

During the winter season, when the fjords are 
frozen over, the poorer classes on the coast 
engage in line-fishing for herring and cod. A 
canvas weather-shield, or tent, is erected on the 
ice, a hole is made in the latter, and a line with 
a dozen or more bright and unbailed hooks is 
lowered. The upper end of the line is secured 
to a supple twig set in the ice, whose office it is 
to indicate when a bite occurs. As many as a 
dozen herrings are often hauled out at one time, 
with possibly a large cod dangling from an 
occasional baited hook. Needless to say that 



FOOD 73 

this fishing is free to native and foreigner 
alike. 

Fresh fish is plainly cooked and well served in 
all hotels, pensionats, and private houses. Cod, 
haddock, and salmon are usually sent to the 
table plain, with a separate sauce of good melted 
butter — the first two often appearing at other 
times as a kedjeree. Whiting, flounder, herring, 
and mackerel, when not boiled, are fried in the 
usual way, with this exception, that only the 
best butter is used in the process, the same 
butter appearing separately afterwards as a 
sauce. The Norwegian cook (almost always a 
woman) is an adept in her treatment of fish, 
and, so far as that comestible is concerned, 
the Britisher can have no solid grounds for 
grumbling. Nor should her soups fail to appeal 
to his palate. But he must put up with the 
absence of clear soups, which are considered to 
be too watery for Norwegian taste. The chief 
ingredients of Norwegian soups are stock, flour, 
butter, an ^%%, and a couple of spoonfuls of 
good cream ; and they are equally applicable for 
asparagus soup, cauliflower soup, champignon, 
and even lobster soup. The latter crustacean 
and crabs are of the good things that are far 
cheaper than with us, but oysters, alas! do not 
belong to the category. 



74 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

Beef and mutton are retailed in the towns at 
about 7 Jd. a pound, and pork, which is considered 
very dear (though a universal favourite), at gd. 
About the cooking of these and their sauces 
the Britisher, fresh from the home methods of 
his own country, will have a good deal to say 
that will not be flattering to the Norwegian 
cuisine. He will probably tell you that the 
joint in its entirety is never in evidence upon 
the table ; that the dishes and plates are not 
heated to the burning-point standard of his 
native land ; that the meat is brought in luke- 
warm, in gobbets, and baked, or fried, or boiled 
to shreds ; and that all this, together with the 
non-nutritious and bile-inducing properties of the 
sauces and the numberless cold side-dishes, leave 
him, after the meal, with a general feeling as of 
not having got any ** forrarder," in other words, 
that there is a lack of finality about the whole 
thing to which his national sense of solidity 
objects. Granted, for the sake of argument, if 
not peace, that his experiences have been con- 
fined to a class of hostelries catering solely for 
a native clientele, and with a proper allowance 
for some measure of national spleen, the interests 
of truth compel me to admit that, from his point 
of view, there is possibly some basis of fact in 
his contention. The only consolation that I can 



FOOD 75 

offer to him is that already given in the earHer 
portion of this chapter, viz., that if he confine his 
attentions to first-class hotels both in town and 
country, and state his case with courtesy, he 
will find that his homely wants (with due con- 
sideration for the wants of other nationalities) 
will be carefully considered and provided for. 



CHAPTER VII 

FOOD (^continued) 

THE Britisher who takes England with him 
during his travels abroad is often puzzled 
how to discriminate at first hand between 
the ways and means of the foreigner as opposed 
to those of his own country. Then the differ- 
ences (or the deficiencies, as he will call them) 
begin to dawn upon him with an ever-increasing 
sense of irritation that culminates and explodes 
to the general discomfort of all concerned. It 
is better to avoid, or rather to forestall, these 
syncopal attacks by a special system of pre- 
applied philosophy, which, if you are not already 
cognisant of it, I will now proceed to expound. 
It occurred to me one day in the train between 
Ostend and Brussels, as I sat staring at the 
landscape sliding by, and wondering in a vague 
kind of way why the surroundings should appear 
to be so English and yet remain so very un- 
English. I will inquire into this matter, thought 
I, and find out for myself the wherein and why 
of the anomaly. And I found them. Here 

77 



78 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

there were no old timber, no hedges, no bracken, 
and no brier ; and there was not a solitary old 
thatched cottage in sight. Incidentally, the roads, 
which were paved throughout, were as correct 
and determinate as Martian canals. This was 
sufficient as a basis. I then set to work to solve 
the reason of the topographical omissions, and 
succeeded in doing so to my own very great 
satisfaction, all with the exception of the thatched 
cottages, for which I had quite a number of 
hypotheses, and to which I propose to return 
some day when I have not got anything better 
to do. But I had arrived sufficiently far to feel 
convinced that there was a good and sufficient 
reason for all apparent shortcomings, and that 
here was a branch of, let us call it comparative 
philosophy, which was admirably calculated to 
preserve the temper, and inform the mind. Thus, 
when at a German hotel recently I ordered some 
sandwiches, and was presented instead with an 
assortment of pictorial postcards on a tray, the 
pleasure I immediately felt in tracing the want 
of connection to the similarity of illustrirtes 
brodchen to illustirte — with the karte left out — 
quite did away with any feeling of irritation 
which the non sequitur might otherwise have 
induced. 

The foregoing is, of course, equally applicable 



FOOD 79 

to the Norwegian, his manners and customs, and, 
above all, his public table. Taking your seat at 
the latter you will at once observe that your 
knife and fork, and possibly your spoon, are 
resting on your plate, and having hastily 
uncrossed them (if you are superstitious) you 
will note that this custom arises from the number 
of glasses and side dishes which are claiming 
their place in your immediate neighbourhood. 
You will find no bread in your napkin ; because 
the former, if cut into chunks, as with us, would be 
quite unsuited to the proper manipulation of the 
wafer-like hors d'oeuvres, and there is, moreover, 
a sufficient supply of sliced bread, in all con- 
science, throughout the length and breadth of the 
table. The hors d'ceuvres are of course all right, 
according to their peculiar lights, especially the 
tiny, transparent slices of smoked salmon, and 
the bay-soaked anchovy of the miniature barrel ; 
but you are not disposed to treat with fishes that 
have not been promptly evicted from their tins, 
and herein you are indubitably in the right. 
Yet if you apply the comparative test herein- 
before mentioned, you will remember that cases 
of ptomaine poisoning have never arisen in this 
connection with fresh tinned fishes of Norwegian 
production, and on second consideration you will 
probably begin to nibble at your sardines, or 



8o HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

your herrings, in good olive oil, with an ever- 
increasing confidence. 

I have dealt with the soup at an earlier stage. 
You will find it most palatable ; and if you are 
very hungry, which is the normal condition in 
Norway, you may pass your plate for a second 
or even a third helping with the easy conscience 
of a Middlewick, and without the loss of social 
prestige which that breezy old gentleman's 
demands produced upon the servants. The 
boiled cod, fresh, crisp, smoking hot, and in 
easily detachable portions, is likewise unimpeach- 
able, as are also the plain boiled and floury 
potatoes, and sauce of the purest melted butter. 
The absence of the joint from the table will not 
have affected your equanimity to any appreciable 
extent ; because, fortified, like the Buddhist, by 
your new sense of solitary and sublime detach- 
ment, you will have observed that there is no 
one at the head or the foot of the table who could 
carve a joint to save his life, that joints are never 
reproduced in the cold stage in Norway, and 
that, after all, it is good when you are hungry 
to be able to begin upon something that might 
otherwise have been unduly delayed under the 
hands of an indifferent carver. Of course it will 
be only British, and human, to revert in thought 
for a second to your last *' market ordinary " at 



FOOD 8 1 

Southampton, with its array of steaming joints 
and plainly cooked vegetables, and the rose- 
cheeked farmer at the head of the table operating 
on the goose with the quick, sure wrist of a 
qualified surgeon. Nevertheless you will not 
reject the large dish of fried lamb cutlets held 
over your shoulder so invitingly by the blue- 
eyed maid of the mountains, nor the diminutive 
slices of roast beef, or mutton, packed together 
like fallen rows of dominoes, nor the Irish stew, 
nor the lobscouse, and certainly not the roast 
grouse, capercailzie, blackgame, and mallard. 
None of these latter have been soused in sauces, 
and you may therefore enjoy their pristine 
flavours with, or without, recourse to their 
numerous attendant sauce-boats. But among 
these last you will search in vain for onion sauce 
and bread sauce, to say nothing of the sauce of 
the horse-radish ; though in your new condition of 
mind you will most probably not care. The pre- 
vailing sentiment in the matter of sauces appears 
to be confined to butter, cream, and flour, with a 
flavouring of wine. But of course there are 
the numerous fruit jellies to be resorted to as 
an auxiliary corrective, should the viands, or their 
sauces, prove unduly rich. 

And so we come to the vegetables. The 

potatoes are again brought in plain boiled — never 
6 



82 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

mashed, or in their jacketST^-^nd you will again 
accept them on sight. Not so the cabbage and 
the cauhflower, if they are really cabbage and 
cauliflower, which you are strongly inclined to 
doubt ; for they are so be-mashed and emburied 
in their sauces that it would puzzle even their 
parent seeds to recognize them again. But you 
are now of an open mind in these matters, and 
you will just try a little — a very little — of this 
alleged cabbage (or is it cauliflower ?). You do 
so, and arrive at the conclusion that your previous 
rejection of the dish was quite unjustifiable : ce 
71 est que le premier pas qui coute : which is equally 
true of a sauce or a shower-bath. You inquire 
of your neighbour whom you met on the boat 
that morning if biliousness and indigestion are 
very prevalent in Norway. He answers and 
informs you that, in so far as he is aware, these 
maladies are absolutely unknown in Norway, and 
you then ask him to pass you the cabbage, and 
that other dish, whatever it may be, and help 
yourself recklessly. Your temerity is rewarded 
by the appearance of the blue-eyed one with 
a dish of boiled peas (you have already 
eaten and enjoyed their stewed pods in dis- 
guise), and when she afterwards presents 
you with another vegetable dish containing 
boiled macaroni you further rise to the 



FOOD 83 

occasion by sending her empty and delighted 
away. 

You will find the salt at your side in that little 
glass container with the silver castor on top. But 
what about the mustard ? Like most Britons, 
you are not favourably disposed towards the 
French variety, of which there are a vast number 
of jars with their ill-fitting and smeary corks. 
You look into the cruet-stand and find a long 
glass containing a quantity of — mustard-powder ! 
You feel sorry for the blue-eyed one when it is 
discovered, as it must be sooner or later, that 
she has forgotten to mix the mustard, and you 
covertly return the glass to its place, resolving, 
for her sake, to get on as well as you can without 
that condiment. But now your neighbour of the 
boat asks you for the cruet, and, removing a 
portion of the powder with a spoon, proceeds to 
mix it in the gravy on his plate. Here is a reve- 
lation! possibly a discovery of great public im- 
portance. You do so likewise, but with a result 
that is of the most ghastly ; and you are about 
to dismiss the subject of mustard entirely from 
your mind when your neighbour remarks : 
** Perhaps the Herr Englaender would prefer 
his mustard a H anglais,'' and hands you another 
cruet, in which you find your Colman pre- 
pared in the only way in which it may 



84 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

be prepared, and you are of course highly 
pleased. 

The bread is quite to your taste. There is a 
great variety of it : delicious, queer-shaped little 
French rolls, and circular slices of rye bread, the 
national bread of the country, and there are 
biscuits galore. You have likewise nothing to 
allege against the Pontet Canet, the Beaune, or 
even the Liebfrauenmilch, all of them safe enough 
ventures in the wine department. But once having 
tasted Norwegian beer you will, as others of your 
countrymen before you, prefer it to all imported 
beverages, and your experience of German beer 
will support you in your future asseveration that 
Frydenlund's pilsner'dl will hold its own against 
the very best beers the Vaterland may brew. It 
is moreover always supplied to you at an ice-cold 
temperature, in the hottest of weathers, on land 
or fjord. As you happen to be dining at a 
hotel, you are not under any special obligation 
to " skaal " with anybody, except, perhaps, your 
neighbour of the boat, a merciful dispensation, 
for which you cannot be sufficiently grateful. 
For this custom (like the thatched-cottage crux) 
has never been quite amenable to my philosophic 
test, and up to the moment of writing I have 
always regarded it as an unmitigated bore. 

The puddings will not interest you unduly, 



FOOD 85 

because, like myself, you look upon them as 
rather an anti- climax to a good dinner. But 
taste them and see how good they really are. 
They mostly run, as you will observe, to blanc- 
manges and variant offshoots of that popular 
food, with an abundance of whipped cream and 
jellies. That violet-coloured composition in the 
circular glass dish is a very common form of 
Scandinavian pudding. It is composed of sago, 
with a little flour and the juice of the bilberry, 
and should be eaten with sugar and cream. They 
treat their rhubarb in much the same way, mashing 
it up finely and stewing it to the consistency of a 
porridge. Candidly I do not care for it in that 
guise, and consider the English method infinitely 
preferable. Pies ! you will not meet with a pie- 
crust in all Scandinavia. I quite agree with you 
that this is a very strange thing ; for the light 
flaky pastry of the Norwegian konditori, or cake- 
shop, is not to be surpassed in Paris itself True 
talk ; it is essentially a country for the boy, with 
a boy's healthy appetite. Permit me to commend 
to your suffrages that yellow-tinted substance of 
the consistency and general appearance of a 
porridge. As a matter of fact it is a porridge, 
made from the moltebaer (the Norwegian cloud- 
berry) and is known as moltegrod — cloud-berry 
porridge. You will not often meet with it on the 



S6 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

tables of South Norway, although the berry 
itself is common enough on all mountain plateaux 
throughout the country. But north of the Dovre 
Fjeld the gathering of the moltebaer is a source 
of considerable income to the donde, and the 
grod itself is much prized in those northern lati- 
tudes. The berries are boiled without sugar or 
other ingredients, to obviate fermentation, and 
then put into casks, where they will keep indefi- 
nitely ; the porridge being afterwards eaten with 
plenty of sugar and cream. I know of nothing to 
approach it, of its kind, for piquant delicacy of 
flavour, unless it be strawberries and cream ; 
although the price asked for the former (80 
kroner a barrel) would seem to be a great point 
in its favour, together with its especial advantage 

J\^jj>3bi being perennial. 

^ You were obviously a little restive at first in 

the immediate presence of some fourteen cheeses, 
and with some show of reason (I have even seen 
a fellow-countryman ostentatiously remove the 
whole consignment to a sideboard before he con- 
descended to take his place in offended state at 
the table dkote); but, believe me, they are all 
very innocuous — even to the venerable gammel 
ost, when you have, in a manner of speaking, 
become acclimatized to it — and they are really 
exceptionally well-tasting. I am quite at one 



FOOD 87 

with you that, like children, they might create a 
better impression by being brought to the table at 
a later stage, but in your new condition of mind, 
which is nothing if not transcendental, you will 
have made due allowance for the Norseman's 
almost mouse-like predilection to cheese — as 
evidenced by his frequent incursions in that 
domain, and at times which you might otherwise 
have considered quite uncalled for. You saw 
your neighbour on the fjordal boat demand and 
consume six large Schweitzer ost sandwiches with 
the coffee that was supplied to him at 6 a.m. ; 
and at the ensuing breakfast, at 8.30 a.m., he had 
pounced upon and devoured a portion oi gjed ost 
before you had even unfolded and adjusted your 
napkin. In the intervals before lunch, dinner, 
and supper he had further recourse to cheese 
sandwiches with his frequent beers and coffees, 
and you are not so certain but that you heard 
him order a final portion of Hollandske ost for 
midnight consumption in the privacy of his 
cabin. For which reason you were not at all 
discomposed when, during the waiting intervals 
at dinner, he toyed with the gammel ost, and 
expressed his well-bred surprise at your lack of 
emulation. These cheeses are almost all of them 
native, and come in large quantities from the 
mountain soeters, where they are prepared by the 



SS HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

blue-eyed one's sister. There is one variety 
which I would particularly recommend for ^'e/d 
tours where the distances are far and uncertain 
between meal and meal, and a light haversack is 
the main consideration. It is 2, gjed osty or goats' 
cheese, of a white species, and is sold in large cir- 
cular discs. In texture it is soft, and even pliant, 
and its flavour benign almost to insipidity when 
compared with that of our Stiltons or Cheddars ; 
but its staying properties are prodigious, and a 
chunk in your pocket will outlast four times its 
weight in the chocolate so much affected by the 
mountain-climbing fraternity. The peasant eats 
it att naturel, cutting it into slices and buttering it 
as he would bread, and I have taken his word for 
it that the flavour of the cheese is thereby con- 
siderably improved. 

^If you are a fruit-lover you will have a rare 
choice of selection from the profusion of good 
things so invitingly displayed before you. There 
you have apples, pears, apricots, bananas, and, 
as we are in the middle of the fruit season, 
cherries black and red, strawberries, raspberries, 
and gooseberries of every variety. Pardon me 
if I venture to anticipate your emotional remark 
in this connection. What a country, you would 
exclaim, for the pies, the tartlets, and the pre- 
serves of our grandmothers, if only this problem 



FOOD 89 

of the pie-crust were satisfactorily solved ! And 
I am heartily with you in the sentiment ; though 
I am inclined to the opinion that this solution 
will not be arrived at while wood fuel is generally 
employed for baking purposes, owing to the 
difficulty of maintaining that equable tem- 
perature which the costlier use of coal alone 
can produce. This applies in a greater degree 
to the demands of the oven for the proper 
dealing with fowls and joints, as well as the 
slow fire necessities of the entries and the 
perfect stew. But the Norwegian is well 
satisfied with things as they are, and of all 
the peoples of Europe I don't suppose there 
are any who have been less influenced by 
foreign innovations in the domain of the 
cuisine. 

The coffee is usually served in the general 
room, or salon ; though there is probably no 
room in the house wherein its consumption would 
meet with objection. It is a good coffee, indeed 
a perfect coffee, and its excellent qualities (owing 
chiefly to its peculiar methods of preparation and 
the absence of chicory) are as justly renowned as 
the best which the Turk or the Frenchman — 
pace the British housewife — may produce ; and 
these admirable qualities are more or less uniform 
in palace or hut. In Norway you will not ask 



90 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

your servant to make you, or get you, or even 
prepare you a cup of coffee. You will desire 
that she will be kind enough to koge (boil) you a 
cup of coffee, which she literally does, having 
first ground the berry in a mill of a far coarser 
gauge than is employed in the home country. 
The berry usually preferred is that of Java, and 
is retailed at about is. 4d. a pound. I I have 
observed that you do not follow the general 
example of adding cream to your coffee, and in 
this you are most wise ;) because home experi- 
ences have long since taught you that cream, or 
milk in your coffee immediately after dinner, will 
spell indigestion as inevitably as a reclining posi- 
tion in one of those many cosy, slope-backed 
fauteuils. Therefore cafe noir and a straight- 
backed chair, by all means. You may ask for 
and get a cup of tea, of sorts, if your taste is 
inclined that way ; which it will not be if you are 
at all a man of affairs. Besides, and between 
ourselves and the table leg, the Norwegian 
methods of brewing tea are only as yet in the 
adolescent stage. I would be therefore loath 
(and I am certain the blue-eyed one would take 
it grievously to heart) to see your newly acquired 
philosophy unduly strained by the possible advent 
of a drowned teapot. You will therefore, having 
well and wisely dined (thanks to my altruistic 



FOOD 91 

good offices), select a cigar from the box of 
** Mild Hindoos " which the blue-eyed one 
has found for you, and ask her, in a not too 
colloquial English, to bring you a list of the 
wines. 



CHAPTER VIII 

MISTRESS AND MAID 

THE raw material of which the Norwegian 
servant-girl, or tjeneste pige^ is formed 
is exclusively bucolic. The town-born 
variety, unlike our cockaignes, is seldom to be 
found in the second and third generation, and, 
like the latter, she is what she is from no motive 
of choice. When she carries her box into her 
father's sluffe^ or country sleigh, and sets out 
with tight lips and an aching heart to face the 
devil of the towns and all his works, I fancy 
marriage and a home of her own is oftener 
the object than a mere wish to ride in a train, 
perambulate the streets, or gaze upon the sea. 
There was a time when she might, of her 
Viking instincts, have desired to see these 
things, if only to compare their actualities with 
the blurred woodcuts of her school reader ; but 
she was a child then, with ideas of home and 
children limited to some broken crockery-ware 
in an egg-box, some half-a-dozen pine cones 
to represent cows, and the whole presided over 

93 



94 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

by a horrible-looking effigy of her potential son 
and heir. Heaven knows she is leaving little 
enough behind her now to pull at her heart- 
strings, if we set aside the abiding love of 
home the Norsewoman carries with her to the 
uttermost ends of the earth ; for the inevitable, 
the dreaded, has happened, as in the nature of 
things heritable it was bound to happen : her 
eldest brother has taken unto himself, and his 
sister's home, a wife — a stranger from a distant 
commune — and she must therefore pull herself 
together, being fully fledged, for the far flight 
that may never more wheel to the homing. 
Her accomplishments are various, if Homeric, 
of their kind. She can boil coffee, bake flat- 
bread, cook a porridge or a potato, scour 
a floor and any number of kettles and pans 
very exhaustively, perform the household wash- 
ing — minus the starching, for which there is no 
special demand — saw and split firewood, spin 
and weave, garner the produce of the fields, 
and, of course, shepherd and milk cows as 
one to the manner born. But her burden of 
in- and outdoor duties have left her little time 
to cultivate a knowledge of la grande cuisine^ 
and the more advanced fields of stitchery (even 
if there were any local demand for it, which 
there is not) ; and as we now find her she 




HAY-MAKIN(; ON A MOUNTAIN FARM 



MISTRESS AND MAID 95 

would prove far more serviceable to others in 
an American boarding-house, or as the wife 
of some distant cousin in the Norse colonies 
of Minnesota or North Dakota, than in her 
native towns. But she has decided upon the 
latter for the time being, and will only set 
out upon the long trek, the trek that will take 
her from her incomparable Noreg (Norway) unto 
all time, as a last resource of pre-marital despair. 
Her educational equipment, as furnished by the 
free school of her village, is fairly good when 
the distractive intervals of potato-setting and 
harvesting is taken into consideration. She can 
read her risgmaal (the language of town culture), 
and the landsmaal (the dialect of the country), 
passing well, and if when writing to a friend 
she should happen to mix the two up with her 
bygdemaal (the patois of her hamlet), and offer 
him godt (good) in the guise of gaat, or got, 
it will not much matter, as the phonetic ten- 
dencies of the three maals will render the word 
easily negotiable. Her knowledge of arithmetic 
is shrewd, if elemental, being derived less from 
the ministrations of her school-teacher than the 
memorative requirements of practical shopping. 
Globe-trotters in a hurry have written her down 
lethargic in appearance, stolid of temperament, 
blunt, honest, and of some religious cast of mind, 



96 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

and the description must serve for the text- 
books if only for its facile cocksuredness. Yet 
little enough did they divine of her true nature 
beneath this mask of stolidity and lethargy — a 
guise always assumed before the blatant stranger, 
to be instantly thrown aside at the approach of 
the tried friend. What knew they of her innate 
sense of fun, or the hidden, inarticulate strain of 
poetry and romance, so rarely revealed in the 
purple passages of her infrequent scrawls? Her 
heart is big, 'tis true, and the item might well 
have been catalogued under her shortcomings, 
but believe me, all you hasty ones, it can do 
a heap of aching. 

She has no difficulty in finding a situation, 
which at first, and in nine cases out of ten, will 
be on a neighbouring farm ; for she still values 
the freedom of a service that admits of her going 
and coming without question, provided always 
she has performed her duties for the day. It 
has reached her ears that urban matrons have 
peculiar views on these matters, with still more 
peculiar ordinances governing them, and she will 
check, times out of number, before she takes 
the final plunge. But our little gaardmandsdatter 
(farmer's daughter) has been visited by a female 
cousin in metropolitan service ; a cousin so 
bewilderingly hatted, bloused, and gowned, that 



MISTRESS AND MAID 97 

she had incontinently laid aside her pretty 
national dress of the centuries to " try on " the 
meretricious confection of the hour, and had, 
there and then, decided for the town. 

The town matron, her future mistress, has, in 
the meanwhile, been advertising for just such a 
raw hand to take the place of the finished article 
—who is about to reward her for her years of 
tuition by marrying the gaardsgut (yard man) 
from over the way. It is amusing to note with 
what frankness the reasons for a girl's leaving 
is set forth in the public papers, all of course 
with a view to allaying the possible suspicions of 
intending applicants for the situation. Marriage 
and sickness are among the usual forms of mis- 
adventure set forth — and truthfully stated, or the 
servants concerned would not be a party to 
them. 

Our applicant's references having been pro- 
visionally approved, she comes to town to inter- 
view her potential mistress, and creates, let us 
say, a favourable impression. If the period of 
service of the present girl has some weeks, or 
even months, still to run, and the applicant 
decides on taking her place, she accepts from 
her future mistress a kroner or two as faeste 
penge (earnest money), wherewith she is as legally 
and irrevocably bound to service as the yokel 
7 



98 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

who takes his shilling from the beribboned 
sergeant of Trafalgar Square. If the position 
should be vacant she enters upon her work at 
once, and finds, if she is at all tractable and her 
mistress reasonable, that she might have gone 
further and fared worse. At first her pay will 
be small enough. During her fifth wheel period 
it may range at about lo kroner a month, and 
will not even in her finished stage much exceed 
15 kroner. But in exceptional circumstances 
the latter may attain to 20 kroner ; and where 
an all-round good servant has been taken to a 
mining or other camp in out-of-the-way inland 
districts, she may ask and get as much as 
35 kroner a month and her keep. This may 
seem to her a great deal ; but when she re- 
members that she has to pay 10 per cent, of it 
in taxes to the local commune, and that her 
countrywomen in America can obtain a wage of 
1 20 kroner a month, it is not to be wondered at 
that she is still asking for more, if not agitating 
for a uniform 20 kroner standard in the home 
country. The apparent opulence of the fashion- 
ably dressed shop-girl has also aroused some 
measure of envy in her otherwise immune breast, 
a feeling which has not infrequently led her to 
try her hand at the former profession, very often 
with futile not to say disastrous results. 



MISTRESS AND MAID 99 

Returning to our little protegee, it will be 
necessary, if painful, to state that if the household 
be a small one her inexperience will necessitate 
her mistress taking upon herself the lion's share 
of the work. But the girl is (as are all Nor- 
wegian servants, with rare exceptions) willing 
enough to learn, and unlike our more specialized 
Belindas, she will do whatever may be required 
of her with the best of good humour and personal 
interest. In a poor and ultra-democratic country 
such as Norway, where the motto " United we 
stand and divided we fall " is referable not only 
to the State but to the home circle itself, there 
is, as between master and servant, a degree of 
familiarity so nicely balanced as to be impossible 
even of conception in an Anglo - Celtic com- 
munity. A husmand's daughter, and therefore 
of the least account in the land, will be treated 
as a social equal on the farms of her native 
valley. She takes her seat at the family table, 
and her food from the common dish, calling her 
master Johan and her mistress Marta without 
fear or compunction. But there is one thing 
she will know better than to do. She will not, 
of her wildest imaginings, set her cap at Thor- 
vald, her master's son and heir. And of good 
cause ; for, were she to do so, the old bonde of 
ancient aet (lineage) would instantly throw off his 



loo HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

disguise and reveal himself to her as he latently 
is, a port-soaked old Tory of the crustiest and 
most aristocratic type. It is the Herr Grosserer, 
his pigelil, and the bonde lieutenant of cavalry all 
over again. But with a difference. The Herr 
Grosserer may see fit to unbend — the bonde never. 
The situation forms the stock plot of many a 
Norwegian romancist whom I know well, though 
for the purposes of better effect the husmand's 
son is usually substituted for the husmands 
daughter, and the bonders daughter for the bonde s 
son — a distinction without the least shade of 
social difference, as the husmands son soon finds 
to his cost when he aspires to the hand of his 
master's daughter. Of course the infuriated 
father kicks him out of doors forthwith, and the 
much-wronged hero proceeds to work his passage 
out to North Dakota, or Minnesota, or there- 
abouts. But his Sigrid, or Solveig, or Astrid 
remains true to the husmand's son of her heart, 
despite the drunken attentions of her mercenary 
father's choice. After three long years, and 
eight chapters, have rolled heavily by, during 
which the hero has become a millionaire and the 
heroine's father a pauper in expectancy, a fur- 
coated and begemmed stranger enters the old 
bonde s house at the psychical moment when the 
auctioneer's hammer is about to transfer it (and 



MISTRESS AND MAID loi 

the appurtenances thereof) to his drunken rival, 
and acquires the home, the estate, the daughter, 
and the old bonde by a prodigious, if quite un- 
necessarily high, bid. It is a pretty plot — a very 
excellent plot — and I commend it to the seri- 
ous consideration of our dramatists in search of 
material. 

At first our pige from the country finds her 
position irksome enough, longs for home, and 
even has vague plans in formation for bolting at 
the first favourable opportunity. But her 
mistress, a very wily old (or young) lady of the 
world, knows her from top to toe, and sets to 
work at once to put her at her ease. She takes 
her under a sort of benevolent, if not motherly, 
guardianship, lends a sympathetic ear to her 
sorrows, and applies the balm of wise, if rather 
worldly counsel to the kibes of the big fretting 
heart. The girls wardrobe is taken under her 
special care, and she sees to it that she is 
provided with a suitable frock to replace the 
national costume which (and here she is a little 
uncertain) is — er — hardly the thing for indoor 
town wear. All this, with a subsequent visit to 
the costumier and a few hints as to the proper 
method of getting upstairs without tumbling 
over her new skirt, puts matters on quite a com- 
fortable footing, and over her cup of coffee and 



I02 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

cheese sandwiches in that almost palatial kitchen 
she comes to the happy conclusion that life after 
all may have its roseate side if only we will take 
things as they come. She has, moreover, not 
been asked to wear a cap. She had dreaded the 
assumption of this pestilent badge of service and 
servitude, and like all her sister servants had 
fully made up her mind to resist its emplacement 
to the last of her powers. She has no objection 
to the usual light-coloured blouse and dark skirt 
of service, or even the prettily-embroidered bib 
and apron of high occasions ; but she draws the 
line at the cap, small or large, frilled or plain, and 
don't talk to her about streamers. Her thick 
long plaits of flaxen hair are brushed out and 
affixed to the crown of her head with circular 
combs, and she is duly initiated in the necessary 
occultisms for the maintenance of the superstruc- 
ture in place. To be sure the combs are a sore 
trial to her at first, and are always fetching away 
and dangling about her ears whenever she is 
in motion ; but this eccentricity, together with 
that of the self-opening blouse, and the skirt that 
won't close, are overcome in time, and in less 
than a fortnight she can walk the streets of a 
Sunday evening with the best of them. She was 
certainly surprised, though of course, highly 
pleased, at the courteous, almost deferent recog- 



MISTRESS AND MAID 103 

nitlon of her presence by the master of the house, 
and his sons and daughters. In similar circum- 
stances the male members of a bonde family 
would have taken less notice of her than they 
would of the cat. So flustered was she by the 
unwonted procedure that she was on the point of 
returning their friendly du, when the enormity of 
the thing as previously set forth by her mistress 
prevented her in the very nick of time from com- 
mitting herself. "You must always," she had 
been told, *' say de in this house when addressing 
or answering the members of the family and 
visitors. We of the household may alone em- 
ploy the du among ourselves, our intimate friends, 
and servants — in this case yourself: reserving 
the de for strangers and acquaintances." The 
anomaly does not quite appeal to the girl from 
the country, where, of course, they are all dus to 
one another as a matter of ancient custom, and to 
her last day she fails to understand why, at a 
dinner party, her master should du his right-hand 
guest and de the lady or gentleman on his left. 
*' If I were the party ded^' she has been heard to 
remark to a fellow-servant in an interval of com- 
parative gossip, ** I shouldn't like it in the least — 
should you ."^ " 

In the course of time she relieves her mistress 
of her tutorial labours, and if the establishment 



I04 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

consist of not more than four or five persons, is 
able, with a Httle extraneous help on special 
occasions, to take upon herself the entire cook- 
ing, waiting, washing, bed-making, and general 
cleaning requirements of the house. 

She welcomes the presence of her mistress, or 
any other privileged person, in the kitchen at 
all times. Indeed, the more the merrier would 
seem to be her axiom in this respect. That 
apartment is in a way a place of call for all 
and sundry who may have the faintest possible 
excuse for calling. There you will find the 
grocer's boy, the town messenger, the man who 
brought the firewood, the cousin in service (with 
her young man, out of service) spending her 
leisure interval serving her cousin ; the reduced 
widow consuming her eleemosynary cup of coffee 
and cheese sandwich at the corner of the dresser, 
the gipsy-woman who foretold her amazing good 
fortune, and the occasional dog who took a fancy 
to her bright face in the street and followed her 
home — all of them entering and re-entering 
and hampering her movements in a way that 
would send the average London cook into the 
drawing-room with her notice on the spot. But 
her mistress does not mind it — she is, indeed, 
part and parcel of the sentiment responsible for 
it — and I am positively certain her maid enter- 



MISTRESS AND MAID 105 

tains no objection to the traffic. Why should 
she when the conviviaHty of these occasions 
all make for the advent of the hour and the 
man ? 

During her first year's service her financial 
status, as might be imagined, is not a very 
flourishing one. Frocks and lingerie, in the 
towns, run into a deal of money as compared 
with the home-woven and home-made clothing 
of her village; and if ''pappa" at home is in 
bad circumstances, and the landhandler, or village 
store-keeper, a little pressing, the greater portion, 
if not the whole, of her small wages will go to 
his rescue as a matter of course. Were statistics 
ever forthcoming of the monthly sums trans- 
mitted in this connexion, they would form 
an eloquent commentary on the Norwegian 
daughter's fidelity, and her sentiments on the 
home question. Her father is to her, let him 
be what he may — good, bad, or hopelessly in- 
different — her life and her law, and rash indeed 
would be the young girl who decided for 
America without the consent of this often im- 
possible old " Pappa " sitting at home at her 
cost. ** Poor old man ! " she will exclaim, with 
kindling eyes and mantling cheek, when you tax 
her with her presumed thriftlessness, **he has 
laid out many a ten-kroner bill for me in his 



io6 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

time, and why shouldn't I do as much for him 
now ? " and it would be impolitic, if not cruel, to 
gainsay her. But of course she has always a 
few ore (farthings) put by for the konditori on 
occasion, or even the Cinema (an astonishing 
revelation to her), where, on her Sunday evening 
**outs," you may often see her in hysterical 
laughter at the man with the vanishing hat, or in 
a luxury of tears at the atrocious proceedings of 
the villain of the play. 

She has plenty of opportunities for taking the 
air. She is given a half-holiday every week, and 
may have an occasional evening out for the 
asking, provided she do so with any claim to 
reason. If there are other servants in the house 
these intervals may be, by arrangement, more 
frequent. Her mistress is complaisant to a fault 
on that point. Yet where their sympathies are 
mutual, and the law of give and take obtains, 
there is no hitch in the routine work of the day. 
If the children are many, and of a helpless age, 
a nurse-girl (at a lesser wage) is required to 
attend to them and take them out for an airing ; 
but the house is never troubled by the presence 
of the foster-mother. The Norwegian mother 
of high or low degree invariably attends to that 
department herself, and the nourice has no status 
in the land. 



MISTRESS AND MAID 107 

A certain casual way of doing things (as 
hinted at in the hospitahties of kitchen) might 
seem to point to the irregular appearance of the 
meals at the table ; but such is not the case. 
Breakfast by instalments, and in the dressing- 
gown, as on the Continent, is not countenanced 
by the Norwegian housewife. That meal, as 
well as the several others indulged in during the 
day, must be on the table and partaken of at the 
klokke slet (literally, the stroke of the clock). 
So grounded is the girl in a methodical and 
ultra- detailed system of preparing and serving 
the meals to stated times, that no amount 
of hurried exhortation (which only throws her 
into a helpless condition of fluster) will induce 
her to hasten the proces by a second. The 
peculiarity is national, and tourists have been 
unduly disturbed by it when, regardless of com- 
ing or departing trains or boats, and frantic 
appeals to '' hurry up ! " and " look lively there ! " 
the girl has proceeded on the even tenor of her 
routine way, rather than have her reputation 
ruined by the production of an undraped tray, or 
the absence of sauces and condiments, which, in 
the desperate circumstances of the moment, were 
really not required. If you are, therefore, of a 
hasty temperament, and will have an occasional 
coffee and sandwich out of hours, you must be 



io8 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

either prepared to wait patiently for them, or do 
as I (Heaven pardon me!) have so often done, 
rushed into the kitchen and, despite her alarmed 
protests, helped myself. Bread and butter in 
Norwegian, by the way, is smorrebrod — literally, 
buttered bread ; but it is not so in effect. If 
you order some Smorrebrod — bread and butter, 
bien entendu — you will be given meat or cheese 
sandwiches. So to be clearly understood on the 
point you shall order '* Smor og brod, uden 
paalaeg'' — butter and bread without impositions. 
In the progress of time our servant girl may, 
for reasons that seldom transpire (she is as close 
as the proverbial nut) desire a change, and having 
once made up her mind on that point nothing on 
earth will prevent her from leaving. Her terms 
of service may be monthly, quarterly, half-yearly, 
or even yearly, but the restlessness and change 
of latter-day life, which have begun to extend even 
to phlegmatic Norway, have made for the monthly 
term so far as the girl is concerned. Yet experi- 
ence goes to show that where she has " taken 
to " her mistress and grown up, as it were, with 
the house, its economies, and its young people, 
she will more often cast in her lot with them for 
life, retiring only at marriage or old age, and in 
the latter event on a small pension from her 
grateful employers. The affection evinced by 



MISTRESS AND MAID 109 

servants for their patrons is often pathetic, touch- 
ing, and in a high degree edifying, and never is 
the Hne of demarcation as between respect and 
undue familiarity overstepped, even during in- 
tervals of apparent equality. The Herr Grosserer 
invites his servants to a seat at his family table 
on Christmas Eve as a matter of course and 
custom, and " skaals " them to their heart's con- 
tent and delight ; and after dinner (the occasion 
being exclusively a family one) they enter his 
salon, still in the position of honoured guests. 
Here they and all the members of the family are 
presented with their Christmas gifts for that year, 
and then hand in hand with their master and 
mistress and the young people of the house, they 
proceed with full-throated song to dance around 
and about the resplendent Christmas tree. A 
similar invitation is extended to them for the 
New Year's Eve dinner, when at the stroke of 
twelve they, one and all — young or old, decrepit 
or sound — mount upon chairs and, as the clock 
chimes, literally jump down and into the New 
Year. 

Butlers and footmen are not in evidence in 
Norway, and men are only employed in private 
houses as yard-men and coachmen. Yet even 
here cases of a thirty or forty years' service in 
one house are not infrequent, and I know per- 



no HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

sonally of one old Jehu who, his master having 
set him up in a small way of business after thirty- 
five years' faithful service, earnestly begged that 
he might be allowed to return to his seat on 
the box. 

I have, in the foregoing, stated the typical 
case of a girl who enters into town service direct 
from the potato-patches of her native valley. 
She is not seldom a source of considerable worry 
and vexation to the husmor, or housewife, who, 
after all the trouble and care of getting her into 
trim, is obliged to commence de novo, because 
the girl for reasons seldom alleged sees fit to 
leave her situation. Therefore it is not surpris- 
ing that the husmor prefers, when she can afford 
it, to pay a little more for the finished article 
from the many housekeeping schools with which 
the country abounds. Generally speaking the 
advantages offered by these excellent establish- 
ments should afford no excuse for any young 
peasant girl being ignorant of the requirements 
of an ordinary town house — provided always that 
her parents are disposed to pay the immaterial 
fee necessary for her tuition. The schools are 
frequently patronized by ladies, who pay from 
60 kroner to 70 kroner a month for a daily 
attendance of three hours, when they are taught 
washing, ironing, jam-making, and all the requisite 



MISTRESS AND MAID iii 

branches of cooking ; and if they are not fully 
content with the leisured methods of a mere 
school, they will (and especially just before enter- 
ing into the married estate) offer their free ser- 
vices, for learning purposes, in the bustling 
kitchen of some first-class hotel. 

The Norwegian servant girl of the town has 
indeed little to complain of, apart from her 
onerous duties — which, after all, are common in 
kind to every one in a poor and struggling 
country. She is well fed and housed, lives and 
breathes in one of the most healthy and pic- 
turesque lands on earth (if she only knew it), has 
plenty of leisure time to amuse herself, and is in 
less danger of getting into trouble in the town 
(where she is required to be in at ten o'clock, 
and where her every movement is exposed to 
the fierce light of day) than in the easier life of 
her home environments. Her native press more- 
ever takes her under its special protection in the 
matter of the foreigner and his traffic in "White 
Slaves," and a tireless committee of altruistic 
young ladies, her countrywomen, sees to it that 
she need never leave her home for service in the 
towns without being duly met at stations and 
housed until such times as she may find a suit- 
able place. Less resourceful, less lithe of move- 
ment, and less spick-and-span than the British 



112 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

servant, she has nevertheless priceless qualities 
of her own that make for her being much sought 
after, even in the land of the servant aforesaid. 
Her unfailing good temper is notorious among 
Norway-loving Britishers, who, at hotels, posting- 
stations, and tourists' huts always greet her smiling 
face with responsive grins as she good-humouredly 
attends to their ridiculous requirements at the 
most impossible times ; or on the numerous little 
fjordal steamers, in storm or calm, omnipresent, 
methodical, and full of sympathy for the sick or 
the *'just going to he's," ''all so different," as 
the said Britishers will vainly endeavour to 
explain to her, " from the native male creature 
of our coasting steamers, who in shirt-sleeves, 
perspiring and belated, whacks us down a plate 
of cold roast beef and pickles, and a cup of stewed 
tea, C.O.D., and, then forgetting the salt or 
the mustard, rushes off unto all eternity." The 
Norwegian servant girl is indeed an institution 
to be profoundly grateful for. But you mustn't 
hurry her. 



CHAPTER IX 

HOTELS AND RESTAURANTS 

1DO not commend the average Norwegian 
hotel, particularly the commercial hotel of 
the smaller towns, to the insomniac whose 
" sleeve of care " has been extensively ravelled, 
and if there be any of my touring fellow-country- 
men who have sought their repose betimes with a 
view to catching an early fjordal boat, and have 
been entertained by a trio of Norwegian ship 
captains on the other side of the wooden partition 
drawing corks and talking ** freights " the live- 
long night through, they will doubtless see fit to 
endorse my contention. We have most of us, at 
some time or another, been edified by the sad if 
hypothetical case of the Frenchman and the Italian 
who were locked into an apartment for forty- 
eight hours at a stretch for the set purpose of 
testing their powers of conversational endurance, 
with the result that at the end of that period the 
defunct body of the unfortunate, and less gar- 
rulous, Italian was found extended on the floor, 
and the exhausted but triumphant Frenchman 

8 "3 



114 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

whispering into his ear. Now, if a Norwegian 
ship captain had been included in the trial, with 
say ** freights " thrown in as a subjective handicap 
for the Southerners, I have no hesitation in 
affirming that the rate of mortality would have 
been increased by one, and that the Norseman 
would certainly not have contributed to it. 

The handelsreisende, or commercial traveller, is 
often, if not oftener, a more disturbing element in 
the small hotel than the sleepless plougher of the 
seas. He comes and goes at all hours of the day 
and night, and as he is always accompanied by a 
stock of samples that would set up an average 
tradesman in a fair way of business, the racket 
imposed by the cartage of the huge boxes up and 
down the stairs in the still watches of the night 
are certainly not conducive to slumber. Noisily 
insistent, and quite oblivious of the claims of 
others to some consideration, he is a continual 
source of expectant misery to the light-sleeping 
guests of these timber - built, and resonant, 
hostelries. It was not the crowing of the cock 
that disturbed the nocturnal repose of the irritable 
philosopher of Ecclefechan so much as the waiting 
for it to crow. But the handelsreisende is a con- 
siderable asset, if not the chief asset, in the 
economy of the hotel, and if he chose to hurl his 
boots or goloshes out on the landing at the dream- 



HOTELS AND RESTAURANTS 115 

ful hour of 2 a.m., or snore (which he seldom fails 
to do) throughout the night, why, it must be put 
up with, that is all. You must not, at the peril of 
being summoned for aere kraenkelse (outrage to 
his honour), thump upon the partition, or send 
him in a note of a gratuitously reflective kind. In 
short, you must not do or say anything of a nature 
calculated to disturb his repose. I remember one 
night, or rather early morning — it was 1.30 a.m. to 
be precise — being haled from dreams of bliss (all 
aback and visibly trembling) by an incursion of 
the kind alluded to. The din was terrific ; doors 
were being slammed, heavy boxes dumped upon 
the landing, the sounds of scurrying feet were 
all over the house, and dominating the whole, 
like the oboe in the orchestra, was a stentorian 
voice demanding the production of a hot meal 
for almost immediate consumption. '' But," 
stipulated the voice, in a tone of uncompromising 
truculence as I got out of bed and proceeded to 
dress, all idea of further sleep being out of the 
question, ''tell me, first, is this thing I have 
heard about your establishment true ? because if 
it is, I prefer to bestow my patronage on some 
other house in the town. Tell me, is this a noisy 
hotel?'' 

It was in a sense a red-letter day to me, that 
day in the out-of-the-way but hospitable little 



ii6 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

hotel, inured as I am to the alarums and 
excursions, and surprises of a nomadic life. The 
departure of the assertive gentleman of the road 
that afternoon, with the usual tempestuous 
accompaniments, having given place to an 
interval of comparative quietude, I had thrown 
myself on my bed with the object of resuming my 
interrupted sleep. But I was brought to my legs 
again almost immediately by an animated discus- 
sion which had supervened in the room next 
to mine, a discussion which, from the fragments 
that remained to me, I seemed to have little 
difficulty in placing. Propellers, keels, ballast, 
leeway, tophamper, and, strange to say, even 
dogs and their keep (which struck me as being 
odd) came hurtling through the partition in the 
old, old way, and in ever- increasing profusion. 
'* Mes amis les Capitaines Norvdgiens se disputent'' 
I muttered with a sigh, as I put on my hat 
and coat to go out for the day. I was about 
to descend the stairs, with that miserable 
assumption of placidity under all circumstances 
which is expected of you in Norway, when the 
door of the adjoining room opened and two 
gentlemen came forth. Of course I was right. 
They were captains ; but not of the ordinary 
vessels of commerce, nor yet of war. They were 
MM. Fridtjiof Nansen and Raold Amundsen, 



HOTELS AND RESTAURANTS 117 

and they had been merely discussing some point 
of Arctic and mutual interest. In a rugged 
country such as Norway, with its small popula- 
tion and prescribed thoroughfares, it is really 
not surprising the number of celebrities you may 
rub shoulders with in the course of a season. I 
have, much to our mutual surprise, tumbled upon 
Royalty, Itself, quietly consuming Its Smorrebrod 
and lager in a place where you might under 
ordinary circumstances have expected to put 
up a capercailzie. At another time I found 
myself, to my unbounded astonishment, seated 
at dinner with a Radical Prime Minister, and 
asking him to pass me the salt, please, without 
the least sense of trepidation. And what a fund 
of general knowledge was this man possessed of ! 
It might — but for one thing — have been absolutely 
encyclopaedic. I learned more things of him, in 
a fluent English, and a two hours' conversation, 
than I thought it possible for any human being to 
acquire — and live. In the days of our grand- 
fathers he would undoubtedly have been de- 
scribed as a ''man of parts," and deservedly so. 
But there was one — only one — thing which his 
Excellency did not know : though I am really 
not so certain that it was sufficiently material 
to subvert nations. And this one thing which 
he did not know — the "odd trick," as it were, 



ii8 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

to me — is, and shall ever remain, in the tentative 
phrase of the late Mr Sterne, another story. 

With some apology to the sleepless one for 
the digression, I would in all earnestness say to 
him, do not go to the hotel of the handelsreisende 
if you are at all self-conscious of nights. You 
will not miss anything by the abstention — there 
are as good hotels in Norway as ever you failed 
to visit — and I am certain he will not miss you. 
He is really of the best of good fellows when 
you get on easy terms with him, and is quite a 
popular institution in the country, but you must 
be possessed of a similar robustuous constitution, 
with its sleeping facilities, if you would patronize 
his haunts. 

So far as I am personally concerned, being as 
it were to the country born, I have been always 
more in evidence at the privat hotel. The 
clientele of these homely little institutions is 
native, as are also the management and staff — 
which latter are usually female, and related ; 
though there is, of course, no restriction as to 
the nationality of the guests or the management. 
The many first-class hotels and sanatoria of 
Norway are by no means less comfortable, if less 
expensive, than similar institutions on the conti- 
nent. Here the insomniac may take up his 
abode without any nocturnal apprehensions in 



HOTELS AND RESTAURANTS 119 

respect of our breezy friend the handelsreisende ; 
for the lifts take his Brobdingnagian boxes noise- 
lessly up and down through the many floors, 
thick pile stair-carpets deaden his elephantine 
tread, his voice is less insistent under the tre- 
mendous impressiveness of his surroundings, and 
his interludal snores at night are securely walled 
in by an impermeable barrier of masonry. But, 
as is the case with the majority of these caravan- 
saries, however luxurious, however crowded, the 
sense of loneliness seems always to be with you, 
though it is difficult to suggest wherein the 
anomaly lies. No exception may be taken to 
the deferent, if automatic, manner in which you 
are ticketed in the hall, numbered in your bed- 
room, or pigeon-holed as to your correspondence ; 
nor can you grumble at the ready, if perfunctory, 
way in which your casual requirements are 
attended to by the numerous staff of servants. 
Were you a bad case in a well-ordered private 
hospital you could ask for no better consideration 
than is vouchsafed to you here. But the sense 
of abandonment would nevertheless be with you 
— which would seem to bring us within some 
measurable distance of a solution of the mystery. 
The inclusive charges of the first-class hotel may 
range from 8 kroner a day, or even less for a 
prolonged stay, to anything you like according 



I20 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

to your requirements. The privat hotels are, of 
course, much cheaper, and their rates can be put 
down at less than half that of the more pre- 
tentious establishments. Boarding-houses, or 
pensionatSy are very numerous in Norway, and, 
according to our ideas, very cheap. The charge 
for a bedroom, with board, may commence as 
low as 70 kroner, and even 60 kroner, for a per- 
manent residence, and, according to the class of 
the pensionat, to 1 20 kroner, and even more, a 
month ; but the average amount, to meet the 
necessities of the normal salary of 100 kroner a 
month, would appear to be 60 kroner and 70 
kroner — say 16 shillings a week ; a sum which 
one would imagine only the presiding genius of 
a Mrs Todgers, or Squeers, could manipulate 
with any marginal possibilities. But it is done, 
and done well ; and the food, which is always 
served on spotless cloths, is good and by no 
means stinted. The privat hotel is as often as 
not presided over entirely by ladies, with a staff 
of girl-servants and the regulation male porter to 
meet the trains and boats. If the guest is at all 
elskvaerdigy or amiable, he will be treated as a 
welcome friend, and he may look forward to his 
periodic visits to the hotel as to a general home- 
coming. There is the table d'hote, of course, 
with its fixed meal hours and fixed topics of con- 



HOTELS AND RESTAURANTS 121 

versation ; but the Herre can dine upstairs in 
his rooms if he has a preference that way. 
There is nothing in the least to hinder so desir- 
able a consummation, provided that the table 
may be laid in the orthodox cookery-school way, 
with all the accompanying paraphernalia thereby 
entailed. The thing must be done properly or 
not at all. You may be surprised to find your- 
self waited upon by the peasant girl, who, some 
years ago, in her gorgeous national dress, rowed 
you over at the ferry station in distant Sorgeland. 
Her father, \}s\^ gaardbruger, or farmer, has paid 
liberally for her housekeeper schooling in Chris- 
tiania, and really to look at her in her smart serge 
skirt, silken blouse, and happy expression of face 
you will be half inclined to approve of the trans- 
formation. She will be no less pleased to see 
you, and to hear all the news from her native 
wilds — and especially to receive the letter which 
her old mother, who has no confidence whatever 
in the integrity of His Majesty's Postal Depart- 
ment, has committed to your safe keeping. A 
curious trait, this latter, among the many 
idiosyncrasies of a primitive people. If you are 
fairly well known, and your honesty and com- 
plaisance have been tried and found not wanting 
you may discover that your services in the role 
of a beneficent handelsreisende are tacitly ex- 



122 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

pected of you. In the country district wherein 
you reside your contemplated journeys to town 
would seem to become common knowledge 
in the same occult manner peculiar to the 
Hindus : and then you may look out for com- 
missions. 

On the mornings of these departures I have 
been entrusted with quite a delivery of letters 
and parcels to relations in town, whom, as well 
as the senders, I had probably never seen before, 
and during the voyage down the tortuous and 
interminable lake the boat has been boarded by 
old women and children with similar consign- 
ments (enwrapped in a protective covering of 
newspaper), which they have thrust into my 
hands, and then departed down the gang-plank 
without further word or sign. Or, driving 
through a lonely forest, the horse would be 
thrown on its haunches by the sudden appear- 
ance from behind a tree bole of an old bonde 
with a ten-kroner bill, and a request that a long- 
outstanding account at the china and glass shop 
in " Strand gade " might be liquidated therewith, 
and a receipt obtained. Sometimes these com- 
missions would be handed to me with a hint as 
to the desirability of my hunting up the recipients 
on the day previous to my return, in view of 
possible replies. Occasionally a limp-looking 



HOTELS AND RESTAURANTS 123 

missive, addressed to me in person, would mate- 
rialize on the door-mat during the night, like a 
Mahatma communication, and then I knew I was 
in for trouble of no mean kind. It might only 
contain a request that I would be so snil as to 
purchase a bottle of cough mixture or a toothache 
remedy at the druggist for value duly enclosed, 
or to call at the hospital and ask the Herr Doktor 
how sister Johanna was getting along after the 
operation, or the still easier task of stamping and 
posting an enclosed letter addressed to Minnesota, 
for which purpose the amount of the postage was 
therewith enclosed. But these were as of the 
nature of holiday errands in comparison with 
some others with which I have been favoured ; 
such, for instance, as the matching and purchase 
of some article of feminine attire, or the procure- 
ment of a squeaking doll with practicable eyes — 
which I hated to do, on account of the suppressed 
mirth which these inquiries always induced — or 
puppies of nondescript origin (often unweaned, 
and without any eyes to speak of), or kittens in 
baskets, or an extremely refractory young pig in 
a bag. But these things had to be done. In 
such a country, and among such people, it would 
have been hard indeed to have refused your good 
offices in these respects, especially when it is 
borne in mind that they would have done as 



124 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

much for you, and more, as a mere matter of 
course, had the occasions ever arisen. 

In winter time it is good to sit at your dining 
table in the privat hotel and enjoy your cigar 
and your glass of wine after the Siberian ex- 
periences of your long sleigh drive, or in summer 
after the tedious and dusty journey along the arid 
high roads. Your hostess will drop in to pay 
her respects, and, incidentally, to see that the 
stove (if it be winter) is in good going order, and 
that Karen, the girl, has not been remiss in the 
matter of clean towels and sheets. Karen will 
bring you in pen and ink and a very formidable- 
looking /r(7/<9^6>/, or register, which she will open 
and invite you to write in. This is one of 
the many little bureaucratic innovations which 
Norway loves to adopt from time to time from 
her German cousin. In separate headed columns 
you write your name, land of birth, profession, 
last stopping-place, intended destination, and the 
dates of your arrival and prospective departure. 
So far as the Britisher is concerned, the filling in 
of these particulars is more or less a matter of 
form, though he would benefit materially were he 
during his solitary wanderings up country to get 
lost among the fjelds, or in other ways disappear 
unduly from human ken, and some clue to his 
latest movements be required. Sometimes the 



HOTELS AND RESTAURANTS 125 

intended purposes of these registers are abused 
most shamefully by tourists of the genus 'Arry, 
who fill in the appointed spaces with apocryphal 
names, countries, professions, and dates, and 
depart before the banality is detected. This, it 
is to be hoped, they would not have done had 
they known that a kindly host or hostess would 
be very probably held responsible for the outrage. 
There are others who blunder from sheer ignor- 
ance of the language and the intention of the 
register, and are therefore to be excused, in a 
measure, when they inform the Norwegian 
Government that they require their coffee and 
rusks at 8 a.m., and request that it will be good 
enough not to forget their hot water. 

The mention of wine, by the way, reminds me 
that you will not be able to obtain either wine 
or spirits in the interval between Saturday after- 
noon and Monday morning, or on certain public 
holidays ; and it is very often doubtful whether 
you may get either these, or beer, at any time, 
owing to the restrictions of the licensing authori- 
ties. Along the tourist routes of the interior, 
cut off as the hotels and sanatoria are from the 
town samlag, or off-licence spirit stores, the lack 
of a wine, spirit, and beer licence is a constant 
cause of grumbling by natives and foreigners 
alike, and their complaints have been hitherto 



126 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

without the least appreciable effect on the peasant 
communes responsible for the dearth. I once 
saw a portly Dane (you seldom see a thin one) 
who had ordered, and been supplied with a sub- 
stantial dinner for himself and his numerous 
family at a public restaurant, rise and walk out of 
the establishment when he was offered the choice 
of water or milk instead of the beer which he had 
ordered. He found it quite impossible, he in- 
formed the astonished waiter, as he and his wife 
and progeny filed out through the doorway, to eat 
any dinner without the beer to which he had 
been always accustomed. The closure will, how- 
ever, make very little difference to you if you are 
an old hand, and must look upon the wine when 
it is red ; for, like some of the tourists above- 
mentioned, you have probably brought your 
requirements with you, or sent Karen out post 
haste to the samlag or the apothecary's shop 
before closing time, for a week-end supply. The 
system, as you will observe, makes for wholesale 
dealing, if not wholesale thinking ; for it is a 
standing subject for debate with the budding 
young Ciceros of the studenterforenings. 

The inexpensive, if well-managed and up-to- 
date ** Mission " hotels of Norway are much 
patronized by our countrymen, either when they 
arrive as tourists or as members of the many 



HOTELS AND RESTAURANTS 127 

international conferences held in Christiania. The 
management and staff are all women, and the 
vexed question of tips is disposed of by the 
addition of a small percentage to the bill for the 
benefit of the servants. Notwithstanding the fact 
that these places are run on fixed tariffs that 
would make our hotel magnates gasp, they are 
found to be paying enterprises, and the profits 
over and above the modest 5 per cent, allowed 
to the proprietors form a substantial contribution 
to objects which their name indicates. 

In Christiania there are a few restaurants of 
the type which we are, for purposes of com- 
parison, in the habit of calling Italian restaurants, 
and there it is possible to obtain all the ready- 
made or quickly-prepared dishes usually procur- 
able in those places. But in the majority of the 
towns throughout Norway their place is taken 
by the konditori, which chiefly runs to cakes 
and smorrebrod, with coffee, tea, chocolate and 
mineral waters as beverages. It has been prob- 
ably found that, apart from the expense entailed 
by promiscuous hot lunches at a restaurant, there 
was really no need for these institutions in a 
small community where the merchant, or clerk, 
or labourer is always within a few minutes' walk 
of his house, or pensionat^ or spise hus (coffee 
shop). The homeless traveller making a short 



128 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

stay in a small town must therefore either attend 
the hotel table dhotes at their fixed meal times, 
or survive, as best he may, on smorrebrody cakes 
and coffee. 

I had occasion, some pages back, to refer to 
the excellence of the pastry supplied by these 
konditorier. The secret, if secret it be, of the 
phenomenon, as compared with the output of 
our cake and sweet-stuff shops of the average 
and therefore cheaper kind, consists in the mere 
fact that fresh eggs, fresh butter, fresh cream 
and the best flour only is used in the konditori 
— which is generally, like its materials and make, 
first-class. Dripping, margarine, shop eggs, in- 
ferior flour, and oil have never been tolerated 
by a public who are nothing if not discriminating. 
And they do a roaring business these konditorier. 
The customers have a free choice of selection 
among the miscellaneous kinds of cakes at a 
fixed price of 7 ore (which is just under a penny) 
apiece. Aeble kage (apple cake), and Napoleon 
kage — an aery, sylph-like structure of flake and 
cream, not at all suggestive of the portly hero 
of Austerlitz — are obviously prime favourites, 
though the roTnme kage, a species of sponge-cake 
flavoured with rum, is a good second. There is, 
or was in my childhood's days, a konditori in 
Trondhjem — Eriksens, I think, was the name — 



HOTELS AND RESTAURANTS 129 

where, in addition to the ordinary cake of com- 
merce, you were confronted with a simmering 
selection of the most deHcious fish and oyster 
patties you shall ever imagine. I do not remember 
having met with them in other parts of the 
country, but I am yet living in hopes that their 
advent in their little iron hot-plates upon the 
konditori counters of all Norway, and possibly 
London, may be hailed with acclamation during 
my lifetime. Mineral waters and brus (aerated 
water with fruit essences) are very popular in 
Norway, and their flat-bottomed, glass-stoppered 
bottles at the absurdly low price of a penny 
farthing a bottle are sold in all the landhandlerier, 
or village stores. The fruit essences most in 
favour for brus are banana, pineapple, raspberry, 
and, of course, lemon. In the towns and on the 
passenger steamers mineral waters, brus, and 
beers are always kept in ice-safes during summer, 
and the temperature of the landhandlers deep, 
cool cellar is not to be despised when the ther- 
mometer dwells at eighty-five degrees in the shade. 
It may seem almost superfluous to mention pre- 
cautions of so obvious a nature, but when I 
call to mind the general laxness of our own 
caterers in these respects, the anomaly of a poor 
people, such as the Norwegians, being so well 
provided for during heat spells that render a 



I30 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

drink impossible on the sunny side of a London 
street, is too striking to be passed over unnoted. 
Non-alcoholic ales and stouts have been lately 
entering largely into the household economy of 
Norway, and as there are no licensing restric- 
tions in regard to their sale, they may be had at 
all hotels, konditorier, or coffee-houses. 

It is amusing and instructive to sit in a 
konditori between the hours of twelve and two in 
the afternoon, and note the customers as they 
enter, get their requirements, and depart. They 
are of all classes and conditions, from the formal 
Herr Statsraad, dropping in on behalf of the 
Frue Statsraadinde, who, with the servants, is 
over busy at home, to order a supply of assorted 
pastry for that evening's informal little selskad, 
down to the tiny, dirty gade gut who approaches 
the counter, as to a dock, for his 7 ore ceble 
kage (with perhaps some broken biscuit thrown 
in by the kind-hearted manageress), and departs 
as though dismissed w4th a caution. It is 
exceeding strange to see a white-haired old 
Major- General — or General- Major, as he is called 
in Norway — come into a place so juvenile and 
unmilitary, and Indulge In food of so ephemeral 
a kind ; but he does so nevertheless, helping 
himself at the counter to a couple of Napoleon 
kager (a concession, possibly, to his militant pro- 



HOTELS AND RESTAURANTS 131 

fession), and retiring to one of the many marble- 
topped tables to read his '' Aftenposten," and 
await his bottle of brus. There are piles of 
plates and heaps of forks for the personal needs 
of the customer ; and to obviate the touching of 
the cakes dainty little silver servers, like fish- 
slices, are ready to hand. You may wait a long 
while (especially in winter) before you will see 
a male customer proffer payment from loose 
change borne in his trousers pockets — thereby 
infallibly revealing the presence of the Britisher 
— for they all carry purses with them, into the 
separate compartments of which they place their 
nickels, coppers, and kroner bills with the most 
infinite circumspection : all with the possible ex- 
ception of the gade gut referred to, who usually 
holds his coin in his hand, or his mouth, for the 
inappreciable interval it remains to him. Young 
ladies, as might be expected, form the bulk of 
the coming and departing stream of customers. 
They enter in twos, and threes, and fours, and 
do not disturb the equanimity of the old General- 
Major in the least when they rather noisily dis- 
cuss the very latest engagement, over their 
cream-puffs and chocolate, at a neighbouring 
table. 

Enter, haply, an old bonde from Soetersdalen, 
in a queer-looking suit of leather combinations, 



132 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

and a child's hat in situ on his grizzled locks. 
Unemotionally he gazes around him at the 
frivolous surroundings, and at the butterfly 
groups of young ladies discussing trivialities and 
consuming what, to his uncultured mind, is the 
veriest pap. He approaches the counter with 
the grim dignity of a red-skin chief, and asks 
the young lady behind it for a bottle of cholera 
mixture '*for Ingerid, his wife." The irrele- 
vancy of the inquiry, which seems to have been 
anticipated by the groups at the tables — for who 
ever heard of an elderly bonde laying out money 
on town cakes ? — is conducive to merriment, in 
which the old General- Major behind his **Aften- 
posten" is constrained to join. But he of 
Soetersdalen turns not a hair of his grizzled locks, 
as he slowly wheels and passes out — to find the 
chemist's shop around the corner, whose resem- 
blance to the konditori^ with its coloured jars, had 
led him into the pitfall. The bonde, and his 
misadventures in the towns, are a standing cause 
of the alleged wit that is in the metropolitan 
papers, and truth to say not without some 
occasion. 

These konditorier are oftentimes constructed, 
decorated, and furnished throughout in the very 
highest artistic taste. It would almost seem as 
though the designer had been one of those rare 



HOTELS AND RESTAURANTS 133 

boy grown-ups whose labour of love had been, in 
a way of speaking, cake-inspired, and who, of his 
latent tuck-shop memories, had been unable to 
disassociate the demands of the sweetmeat from 
the more formal claims of architecture and mural 
decoration. I know a konditori in Christian- 
ssand, nearly opposite to the hotel which is called 
'' Ernst's," that will bear out my contention, and 
into which I have occasionally dropped, less with 
a view to refreshments than to solace the eye 
and the mind in a scheme of structural and 
decorative harmony that may not be excelled. 
The outward appearance of the shop, if you omit 
the quaintly panelled doors with their plate glass, 
is not particularly edifying, nor is it improved by 
the bakery adjoining. It is only when you have 
passed the double-doored entry that you find 
yourself in an apartment which, less noticeable 
perhaps at a first glance, you must admit, after 
due inspection, to be designed and equipped to 
perfection. The prevailing colour is a dead 
white, chosen apparently to harmonize with the 
white marble counter, the little square-topped 
tables, likewise of marble, and the floor, which is 
tiled in black and white. There is no upholstery 
in the place, and the display of pastry on the 
counter is hidden from the general eye by a 
marble curb in front. Yet there is no sense of 



134 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

crudeness in your surroundings ; for the simple 
seventy of the design seems to be softened and 
neutraHzed, as it were, by its inevitable and 
exquisite proportion. Curved lines have been 
dispensed with to the exclusive employment of 
the rectangule — the key to the inspiration — 
which in wall, counter, table, tile, and to the 
minutest panel, occur and recur, relate and inter- 
relate in a harmony of grace that is quite 
symphonic. And this harmony is extended to, 
and assimilates with everything fixed or movable 
in the place. The perfectly proportioned and 
disposed shelves and fitments at the back of the 
counter have their perfectly proportioned and 
disposed jars of sweet-ware upon them ; and 
even the fragile chairs are so intimately connected 
with their tables, the chocolate-coloured busts 
of their Majestys of Norway on their marble 
pedestals, and the very cupids and flowers on the 
panelled and glazed ceilings, that you will almost 
infer that they had been specially designed for 
the room, or the room for them. It is impossible 
for the most captious to pick out a line, or space, 
that might have been otherwise ordered to 
improve the general scheme. It is perfection. 



CHAPTER X 

LES NORVEGIENS s'aMUSENT 

MUSIC, literature, the drama, and the many 
seasonable sports by flood and field, form 
the sum of the Norwegian bymancCs relaxations. 
The bonde is not with him here to any great 
extent, as he is seldom, indeed, with him any- 
where, except in rare moments of national crises. 
His musical inclinations are practically confined 
to the Hardanger fde, or violin of the country, 
and the langeleik, an instrument of the dulcimer 
kind, and as primitive as the virginal, if not as 
uninspiring. I have only once had the privilege 
of hearing the langeleik played on, and I cannot 
truthfully say that I was particularly edified. 
The Hardanger fdle is a rather ornate violin, 
having for resonant and sympathetic effects a 
second set of four steel strings under the usual 
e, a, d, and g, of what is called the German 
violin, and possessing a more level bridge, for 
** droning" facilities. It is charming to listen 
to for about the space of twenty minutes on 
occasions, and amid surroundings that are dis- 



136 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

tinctly of the fjeld and fjord ; after which it is 
apt, of its iterative limits, to pall upon the bymand 
fresh from the concert rooms of Christiania. I 
have often heard the /<//<? played on by very pro- 
ficient peasant performers, or spillemcend, and 
have seldom seen them double-stop, move from 
the first position, or resort to harmonics, or 
octaves. The music is entirely memorative, and, 
unless transmitted, is lost at the death of the 
composer. The playing is decidedly trick- 
playing, in that it seeks above all things to 
convey accurately the various sounds of awaken- 
ing nature in the Norwegian dais. Some of 
these pieces are wonderful in their imitativeness, 
and when the empirical nature of the so-called 
science, and the limits of a first position are 
considered, the performance is a marvel of tonal 
accuracy. Whatever the limitations of a spille- 
mand may be he seldom or never plays out of 
tune, nor, indeed, out of time, if the heavy 
tramping of his foot, and sometimes both feet, 
indicate a defined beat. The minor keys, as 
might be imagined, are almost invariably resorted 
to, and unadorned melody seldom figures in the 
repertoire of these bucolic composers. Melody 
pure and simple appeals far less to their primi- 
tive imagination than the lively dance measure in 
a minor key. I once had the mortification of 



LES NORVEGIENS S'AMUSENT 137 

playing, without request, the first portion of the 
andante movement from Mendelssohn's violin 
concerto, on a Hardanger f^le, to a presumed 
appreciative company of Bratsberg bonder : a 
sorry, poor performance, possibly — though not 
of malice prepense. The general opinion, as 
voiced by an old lady, who had been knocking 
over fire-irons and scouring a coffee-kettle during 
the interval, was: **ja-ja-ja! the fde is the 
greatest of all instruments ; but, God He knows, 
one must first learn how to play upon it properly." 
A Corellian giga, however, met with a much 
better reception ; for of its '' damnable iteration " 
it might have been composed by one of their 
own spillemcend. Peasant Norway has produced 
veritable prodigies mfdle composition and play- 
ing — the Mollar gutten of Telemarken, in parti- 
cular — and y^/^-play ing contests for prizes are as 
popular in the western districts as are the brass- 
band md6es in the North of England. The 
bonde is naturally very proud of his file and the 
prowess of his children in respect of it, and he can 
only attribute the want of appreciation of the 
towns of his country and the continent to the 
effete taste that prevails in those super-cultured 
communities. And he is probably right — from 
the bonde point of view ; for the appreciation, 
or depreciation, of music is, after all, a matter of 



138 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

the listener's responsive, or irresponsive personal 
temperament, and the music of the file, the 
langeleik, and the bagpipes will always meet 
with enthusiastic reception wherever it may 
happen upon its human affinities. These Har- 
danger f^les, which are as a rule elaborately 
inlaid with mother-of-pearl and other marquetry, 
are largely turned out by the peasant brothers 
Sandeland, of Brunkeberg, in Telemarken. 

The bymand, on the other hand, is also in- 
tensely national in his musical tastes, if in another 
direction ; and the cultured works of his own 
countrymen appear to an almost monotonous 
extent in his programmes, often to the complete 
exclusion of the foreigner. Even among people 
of some musical culture I have met with those 
who had never heard of Sullivan or Elgar in 
any connexion, and Balfe, Wallace, Purcell, and 
Gibbons were to them as though they had never 
been. The Norwegians, generally speaking, are 
not musical in the sense that the average German 
or Italian is musical, Indeed, a well-known 
German authority has, to their considerable 
amusement, dubbed them unmusical. Without 
going quite as far as the learned professor in 
question, I would premise that the attitude of the 
Norwegian public towards music is somewhat 
analogous to our own towards football and cricket. 



LES NORVEGIENS S'AMUSENT 139 

They are less emulative than appreciative. You 
will rarely enter a hotel, or a steamer, anywhere 
on the coasts without finding a piano in the 
salon for public use ; yet during years of travel 
I can conscientiously affirm that I have never 
seen a Norwegian gentleman sit down to the 
instrument as an executant. But when the 
brigademusikken plays, or the mandsangforening 
sings in a public place, you will find no more 
appreciative crowd than that which hangs breath- 
lessly on their most attenuative pianissimo. Of 
the nature, or genre, of the music itself books 
have been written, and it would be an act of 
supererogation on my part to look in where the 
master has trod. Suffice it to say that you may 
never listen to it on foreign seas, or soils, without 
being transferred in the spirit to the great, rugged 
mystery-land that evoked it. Grieg, Nordraak, 
Kjerulf, Lasson, Bull, Sinding, Svendsen, Winter- 
hjelm, and many another, are they not to be 
found in the music-stands of most of our British 
homes ? 

The bonde takes very little stock in literature 
or the drama. The former, as represented by 
the poetry and prose of his own sturdy sons, are 
seldom pleasant reading to him, so far as he and 
his home life are concerned ; and the latter, when 
he ever does visit a theatre, frankly speaking, 



I40 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

gives him the blues. He is, of course, exceed- 
ingly proud, in his self-contained, grim way, of 
the achievements of this irrepressible son, and 
more especially when, as a diversion, he runs 
amuk among the byfolk ; but the sentiment is 
rather a negative one, and he thinks he would 
be far better employed at home splitting wood. 
For this reason he has, as a member of the 
national Storthings always been slow to vote 
stipends to these youngsters for their studies 
abroad, or even for the bare necessaries of life 
— thereby often driving them into the arms of 
Danish broachers, and making their last pub- 
lished opinions on their home life and fiscal 
methods infinitely worse than their first. And 
what a galaxy of talent and genius they go to 
make up — these young men terribly in earnest ! 
Many of them (including not a few patricians of 
the towns) have grown old and passed away, 
and left their names as household words in all 
Scandinavia, if not all literature. Aasmund 
Vinje, the Norwegian Burns ; Ibsen and Bjorn- 
son, whom we all know ; Jonas Lie, novellist 
of the hearth and home, and apostle of hope ; 
Wergeland, the people's poet, and ever of the 
people's heart ; Welhaven, lyrist, eclectic, solitary, 
and retired, yet no less profound as an exponent 
of Norwegian nature ; and last, if not least, 



LES NORVEGIENS S'AMUSENT 141 

Alexander L. Kielland, novellist, dramatist, and 
writer of belles-lettres, the Daudet of the North, 
and the first of them all to invest a not too 
subtile idiom with that sparkle, wit, satirical 
humour, and felicity of phrase usually associated 
with the best French essayists. Great men 
these, one and all ; but they have been suc- 
ceeded by others no less capable of carrying on 
the torch, and the names of Caspari, Garborg, 
Hamsun, and the coming young poet Olaf Bull, 
together with those of the brothers Vilhelm and 
Thomas P. Krag, Jacob Bull, Heiberg, Carl 
Naerup, Clara Tschudi, Alvilde Prydz, Hulda 
Garborg, and the quite juvenile Sigrid Undset, 
not to mention many another scarcely less 
brilliant, according to his, or her, particular 
lights, augur well for Norway's literary future. 
But here again it behoves me to be most chary 
about entering into domains where the more 
critically competent angels, MM. Archer, Gosse, 
Brandes, and Boyesen do not fear to tread. 

In the domain of sport, in that word's best 
sense, and as applied to fishing and shooting, the 
bonde is again at odds with the bymand. The 
term *' sport" is utterly incomprehensible to him, 
or only considered from the point of view of 
quantity, or avoirdupois, and quite regardless of 
exterminatory results. Indeed, it would almost 



142 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

seem to be of his nature that he cannot have a 
good thing without hounding it to death. Let a 
fishing ground, rich in prawn and shrimp, be dis- 
covered, and it will be dredged out of existence 
in no time, and to the irreparable damage of 
local fishing and fisherman alike ; certainly this 
must be laid more particularly at the door of his 
cousin the sjo-bonde (sea peasant) ; but he is not 
at all backward himself in similar devastations, as 
evidenced by the wholesale autumnal netting of 
his lakes, the spearing of fish in their tributaries 
when they run up to spawn, the general use of 
the otter; and he knows I have caught him 
more than once, or twice, in the very act of 
dynamiting the fish in their favourite pools. He 
has adopted this last and detestable practice from 
the workmen of the many mining and other 
camps as a swift and convenient method for 
getting all the fish hfe wants without undue 
physical exertion. As a result, big-trout fishing, 
except in the specially guarded lakes of the sana- 
toria and hotels, distant mountain tarns, or on 
the plateaux of Finmark, is practically of the 
past. Of small trout, of course, there will always 
be any quantity available ; but they will, under 
present circumstances, never be other than small 
trout — or ''six-inchers," as they are jocularly 
termed. Game, despite a large amount of 



LES NORVEGIENS S'AMUSENT 143 

illegal snaring and deforestation, and thanks to 
the comparative dearth of donde-trained dogs, is 
still sufficiently abundant, and the grouse of the 
fjelds contribute largely to the incomes of donde 
communities. But there is ample room for 
betterment were the laws regulating these matters 
strictly enforced. Let it not be imagined for a 
moment that the Government has not been alive 
to the heinousness of some of the proceedings 
above mentioned. In few other countries have 
the interests of fish and game been so well 
provided for as in Norway — on paper. The 
pity of it is that it has been found next to im- 
possible to maintain the laws governing them. 
The lensmand, or rural constable responsible 
for their enforcement, is usually a bonde, living 
as a bonde, and related by his business voca- 
tions or consanguinity to his ^^Wo-^ - bonder — 
who, after all, own the lakes and forests in 
question — and he is therefore naturally desirous 
of maintaining peaceful relations with all and 
sundry. One cannot contemplate this state of 
things without some feelings of sympathy for 
the many societies of Norwegian sportsmen, 
and others, who have been, and are, striving 
so hard to conserve the fish and game of what 
should be one of the best sporting fields in 
Europe. In the chivalrous attribute of "playing 



144 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

the game" the Norwegian gentleman ranks 
second to none. He is a sportsman to his 
finger tips ; and therefore does he merit the 
support of all true sportsmen in his endeavour 
to stem this destructive crusade, with its motto 
of — help yourself, when, how, and where you 
can. The big-game shooting of Norway, in- 
cluding moose, red deer, and reindeer, is mostly 
confined to the rich of other countries, and is, 
owing to the lack of poaching facilities in this 
respect, fairly well protected. The same refers 
to salmon - fishing, though recent communal 
decrees prolonging the period of coastal netting 
from two dogn (forty-eight hours) to three dogn 
(seventy-two hours) a week is not unnaturally 
viewed by Englishmen (who have leased most 
of the salmon rivers) as the beginning of the 
end of even that staple sport. On the other 
hand, the Norwegian burgher has the advantage 
in respect of general shooting in a number of 
privileges not accorded to the foreigner, who 
is handicapped by the annual charge of loo 
kroner for a gun licence, the necessary permis- 
sion to shoot over another man's property, and 
the law forbidding him to import his own dogs. 
None of these restrictions, however, will effect 
the ordinary tourist to any great extent, as his 
stay in the country practically coincides with 



LES NORVEGIENS S'AMUSENT 145 

the close season. Bears, once so numerous all 
over the country, are, with the wolves, little 
to be seen, though were a close time ever 
agreed to respecting them, which is not at all 
likely, they would doubtless soon over-run the 
country again. However, though the day of 
the bear is practically over, he is uncomfortably 
in evidence at times over a widely extended 
area of the country, and particularly in the 
neighbourhood of the Bandak and Nordsjo lakes 
in Telemarken, and the Drangedal Mountains 
to the south. They are marked down in their 
winter lairs by the bonde, an observation ring 
is drawn around them, and the '' ring " is adver- 
tised, and leased, to the Herr Grosserer, or his 
foreign cousins, for the ensuing kill. The 
glutton is still far too common, and among 
the mountain pastures in the south-west his 
depredations are more terrible than that of 
any other animal of prey ; but it is quite an 
event to get within shooting distance of him. 
The same applies in a lesser degree to the 
gaupe, or lynx, who would almost seem to 
possess the crow's prescience in regard to un- 
armed men ; for I once followed one at less 
than five hundred yards' distance through a 
forest path for over a mile, during which he 

trotted along in the most leisurely manner 
10 



146 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

possible, stopping every now and again to 
squat down and watch my movements, his 
tufted ears erect, and his large staring eyes 
fixed curiously upon me, like the great wild 
cat he undoubtedly is. 

On the ski question the bonde certainly scores 
over his town cousin, for he it was who not 
only was the first to adopt them, and fit them, 
in a modified form (the circular tryger), to the 
hoofs of his horse, but he taught the bymand, 
if not the world (as we see it in the Swiss 
chaussees), their possibilities. The wonder is 
that they have not been adopted long ago in 
other alpine countries. As a child the delights 
of ski-running are among my very earliest 
memories. In those days, however, a bonde 
would never have dreamt of fastening the ski 
to his feet, as is now the general fashion ; for 
he had got the notion into his head that it 
would result in a broken leg, or a twisted knee 
or ankle-joint, should he fall in one of his 
ferocious mountain descents ; and when it is 
remembered that he showed as little hesitation 
then, as now, in negotiating a hopy or an almost 
vertical rend, it testifies greatly to his undoubted 
intrepidity. It had its disadvantages, this loose 
ski system, in many ways, as when, for instance, 
in the event of a fall high up on a steep wooded 



LES NORV^GIENS S'AMUSENT 147 

slope, a runaway pair of ski came flying down 
at express speed among unsuspecting wayfarers 
below ; or when, on days of varying tempera- 
ture, the fotos, or foot-loops — often of wicker — 
w^ere constantly getting caked up with frozen 
snow. In those days the prize ski-rends of the 
bonde, with their hops, were very much as they 
are now ; but the manner of descent, and the 
accoutrements of the ski-runner, were different. 
The double ski stav (stave), an innovation of 
the towns, was then unknown, and a single one 
was considered to be quite sufficient for brake 
purposes. The legs were also held very widely 
apart, in order to maintain what was then erro- 
neously considered to be a proper equilibrium. 
And thus, in a crouching position, with his red 
stocking-cap (now, alas ! of the past) drawn 
down over his ears, the young bonde would 
glide over the lip of a precipitous hill, to sving 
triumphantly past the applauding spectators 
on the plateau below : or disappear under the 
kop in clouds of snow, out of which a pair 
of runaway ski, like lightning, darted most 
threateningly. But apart from these prize kop 
rends, the practised bonde ski-runner very rarely 
falls. Born and bred, as it were, on ski, the 
latter are to him what the horse is to the 
nomad, and I have never seen a gaucho, or 



148 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

a Pampas Indian, fall otherwhere than on his 
feet. 

When the Telemarken lads eventually came 
to town, and showed the astonished bymand 
what might be accomplished on a pair of ski, 
the latter fell to thinking furiously, with the 
results that the bymand is now not only as good 
as, if not better than, his bonde master, so far as 
the ski is concerned, but Norwegian ski-resorts, 
with their ski-running contests, are (vide tourist 
bureaux itineraries) to be found all over the 
country. But if you wish to see the bonde in his 
native ski element, and desire to study the uses 
of the ski in the everyday home life of himself 
and his womenkind, then you must take the 
steamer from Skien, in Telemarken, to Kirkebo 
— a half-day's trip, if ice admits — and sleigh up 
the steeps of Brunkeberg until, in the course of a 
couple of hours, you reach the little mountain 
hamlet of Morgedal. Here you will perhaps 
notice that the use of the ski is mostly confined 
to the younger people of both sexes. In bonde 
Norway grey hairs spell old age, if not senility, 
and an elderly bonde would look upon it as the 
height of incontinence to take up a sport which 
he has long since laid aside with the activities of 
his youth. In the skating field he is still facile 
princepSy though other nations, and especially 



LES NORVEGIENS S' AMU SENT 149 

Russia, have lately begun to draw unpleasantly 
close to his heels. 

Strenuous efforts are being made in Norway 
to divert the stream of foreign ski-lovers, 
and especially Britishers, from Switzerland to 
Norwegian winter resorts. It is advanced 
that there are practically two ski seasons in 
Norway : the ordinary winter season of the low- 
land resorts, and the late spring and summer 
season of the fjeld hospices, such as Finse, on 
the mountain-railway connecting Bergen with 
Christiania, where ski-running may be enjoyed 
as late as July. This advantage is certainly 
being recognized by our ski-runners, who singly, 
or in personally conducted batches, have been 
increasingly in evidence at these resorts during 
the last few seasons. But if this venture is to 
be pursued on the same scale as in Switzerland, 
then Swiss methods must also be adopted. The 
present hotel accommodation, ample just now, 
would have to be very much extended ; public 
moneys must be forthcoming for the acquisition 
and upkeep of the necessary ski-running, bob- 
sleighing, and skating terrenes ; and the said 
terrenes must be set apart for the exclusive 
use of the visitor, native or foreign. That the 
first and even the second provision may be 
possible of attainment there ought to be little 



I50 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

doubt; but that the bonde, with his peculiar ideas 
of meum and tuum, and his sense of absolute 
social equality, will assent to the third sine qua 
non, I have my own very decided opinion. And 
it must be remembered that the bonde, as voter 
and legislator in these matters, is at present a 
power in the land. 

In addition to the Eidsvold, Larvik, and 
Modum mineral baths, there are no less 
than seven sea-bathing sanatoria, twenty-four 
sanatoria inland, and a number of first-class 
hotels and mountain hospices at the disposal 
of the Herr Godseier, the Herr Grosserer, the 
lesser fry, and the numerous foreign invaders 
of their country. It would be invidious to 
mention any particular one of these where all 
is arranged with an almost clockwork perfection 
of detail for the comfort of the guests. Those 
on the coasts are chiefly devoted to the curative 
processes of balneology, a branch of medical 
therapeutics which has lately made great strides 
in Norway. Here the different forms of treat- 
ment are without end, including the famous 
Medusa or jelly-fish bath, mud baths, hot-air 
peat massage, pine-needle baths, carbonic acid 
sea-baths, and others too numerous to tabulate. 
Most of these sanatoria have their resident 
physician, with hydropathic treatment for 



LES NORVEGIENS S'AMUSENT 151 

every ailment under the sun, while the re- 
maining hotels and hospices have no better 
inducements to offer than an excellent table 
and the pure airs of the mountain and 
forest.^ 

^ The word " Sanatorium," as used by Norwegians, does not 
necessarily imply a resort for consumptives, or other invalids. 



CHAPTER XI 

IN THE TOWNS 

It has been humorously alleged that a complete 
census of any Norwegian town may be taken 
when the arrival of a steamer sends its inhabitants 
hurrying down to the landing-stage to give it 
greeting. And there is an element of truth in 
the jape ; for these advents, or an occasional 
alarm of fire at night, are pretty certain to 
produce an exhaustive turn-out of the popula- 
tion. The inquisitiveness of the Norwegian is 
proverbial, and his methods for satisfying the 
craving deer-like, if at times a little fatuous ; but 
it is all so obviously natural and well meant that, 
after a few years of the infliction, you will not 
only get used to it, but may actually catch 
yourself in the act emulating it. In the towns 
this characteristic is innocuous enough in its 
measure of well-bred control ; but in the country, 
where all things are eternally equal, it is quite 
another affair, and I have seen an English 
demagogue, who, quite unmoved, has faced his 
howling audiences from a Trafalgar Square 
plinth, thrown into a state of absolute frenzy 

"S3 



154 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

by its persistent inquiry and bovine stare. The 
Britisher who elects to reside in Norway, and 
considers (as he very naturally will) that his 
private affairs are entirely his own, or, at most, 
a discretionary matter of the State, will be 
surprised to see his name with his presumed 
(he will not be requested to state them himself) 
income and fortune appearing in the local 
newspapers and the public directories,^ and all 
particulars of his investments affixed to the 
church door of his parish. But this is, of 
course, a ruling which is tacitly accepted by 
the public, and he will doubtless get as used 
to it in time as he will to any other enactment 
of the authorities. The laws of Norway, so far 
as he is concerned, are particularly discerning 
and just, and, should contentions arise, he will 
not have cause to complain that he, as a 
foreigner, has been unfairly treated. 

The traffic of the inner harbour is one of the 
standing attractions of which the inquisitorial 
efforts of the townsman never seem to tire. The 
well-lit piers, with their adjoining quays, are in a 
sense public promenades ; and there on any 
evening you may find the bulk of the population 
of a small town stolidly watching the berthing of 

1 Since these lines written sundry modifications in the laws 
have been introduced to meet public sentiment in this respect. 



IN THE TOWNS 155 

a home-bound barque, or emotionally speeding 
some little coffee-pot of a local tug on its four- 
mile route across the fjord. It is, of course, a 
harmless form of dissipation at its worst, and 
failing any other it is difficult to suggest how the 
intervals of rest might be better employed. 
There are people who will tell you that without 
these adspredelser, or abstractions, life in the 
small town would be simply unendurable. But 
it is only the young people who will tell you 
this — the young and travelled. The elderly and 
hardened know better ; but they say nothing, for 
they also have been young,and have travelled, and 
they have long since lived the sentiment down. 

The travelled youths of Norway frankly 
acknowledge that life in their towns, with the 
possible exceptions of Christiania, Bergen, and 
Trondhjem, is too planmoessigy smaalig, and 
snoevsyndet, that is to say, too ordered, petty, and 
narrow-minded, to meet their conceptions of the 
life as it should be lived ; and they will tell you, 
with their usual candour, that they often find 
their existence irksome almost beyond tolerance 
when they return from a sojourn amid the distrac- 
tions of a merry continental town. They lay the 
blame for this deplorable state of things on the 
complacent heads of their bourgeois elders, who, 
they opine, have been young themselves in their 



156 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

day, and therefore ought to know better. *' Know 
better than — what ? " I have not unnaturally, if 
a little maliciously asked ; but the query has 
seldom produced a satisfactory, or even a 
coherent reply ; for the Norwegian bourgeois 
and his views is orthodoxy itself, and our 
inveterate old friend Mrs Grundy has her con- 
nexions in every town and village in Norway. 
The poorer cousins of the interior who have 
never travelled, and who are never likely to do 
so, unless they emigrate, have also these periodic 
intervals of loengsel, or longing, especially if they 
have been to town and visited the cinemas ; but 
beyond a softly sighed out '' ja-ja, san " of 
resignation you will never hear them rail at their 
lot in life. They have occasionally produced 
writers of undoubted genius, these country 
cousins, who, of their drab surroundings and this 
tendency to Icengte, have been impelled to rebel 
and furiously attack the cast-iron order of things 
as they are, but the things as they are being (in 
the opinion of the Herr Grosserer) the only 
possible alternative to the unmentionable things 
that might be. Church and State have gone on 
their respectable, if exasperating way without 
any particular damage to speak of. 

It would be difficult, indeed, to imagine how 
any other kind of social system could make 



m THE TOWNS 157 

for a greater happiness of the individual in these 
little communities than at present obtains. In 
Western Norway, where this sporadic restiveness 
usually takes literary form, the weather has a 
good deal to answer for ; but you cannot help 
the weather, and after all it is seldom much 
worse than that of highland Scotland, or the 
valleys of South Wales — say that of Neath, for 
choice. I once lodged, during a wet season, in 
the dog-infested cottage of an Aberdylais tin- 
plate-worker, and truly of the two evils I 
infinitely prefer Norwegian Floro at any season : 
and Floro, mind you, is even moister than 
Bergen — where the dogs bark at a man who 
goes about without an umbrella and macintosh. 
One must, nevertheless, admit that life in these 
small towns is, to put it mildly, not particularly 
hilarious, and if it were not for the fact that their 
peoples have an almost fatalistic faculty of making 
the best of things, and are constantly migrating 
from one town to the other, or emigrating, there 
might be a good deal in the contentions of the 
young people aforesaid. It is a soul-depressing 
obligation, as an instance, to have to raise your 
hat some scores of times in the course of the day 
to the same persons, in the same unavoidable 
main thoroughfare, and accompany the act with 
as many ** Good day agains," ** farewell agains," 



158 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

and ** until our next meeting agains." A week 
of this sort of thing is all very well in its way, if 
you are on a short visit. But a lifetime of it ! 
*' Granted," you will probably remark, '' but why 
do it ? " Why ? Because — well, because if you 
were to fail to do so on insular, or other scruples, 
you would at once run the risk of being placed in 
the category of the subversive young writers 
before mentioned. The custom of the country, 
which ordains that the new-comer must call first 
on the residents, and, if a gentleman, first raise 
his hat on meeting a lady, will afford you no 
relief whatever. You must know everybody, or, 
if not, everybody will very particularly want to 
know the reason why, and, failing any, find you 
one — or more. And there you have the whole 
system as a microcosm. Any one of these petty 
ceremonial amenities foregone is tantamount to 
an implied dissent from the whole. And the 
machinery of the whole will not go out of gear 
for you — or a dozen like you — or even pause for 
one second on its ponderous and well-oiled 
centres to express its surprise. Of its terrible 
powers (which are centrifugal for the occasion) 
it will incontinently throw you — or a dozen like 
you — into the outermost darkness of the social 
pariah, where you will please to remain until you 
have learned to behave. " Yet, they are all so 



IN THE TOWNS 159 

democratic," you will further remark, *' so almost 
Utopian, the most free-and-equal of the peoples 
of the earth ! " Quite so ; and so they always 
will be. They are quite satisfied with the things 
as they are. I have not been complaining. 
Nobody has been grumbling : only a few youths 
— who have travelled. 

Rome is to young Norway what Paris is 
assumed to be to the American. So is Florence, 
or Padua, or Milan, or any other town as long as 
it is under the blue skies of the gloriously sunny 
South. But this is during the Romeo and Juliet 
age, and they give place, with the salad, to Berlin, 
or even Dresden. Paris comes next, and then 
London — which is usually associated, among the 
poorer classes, with the House of Lords and Jack 
the Ripper. London is so vast, and so very ex- 
pensive, they say, and the English home-life 
(especially the institution of the boarding-house, 
with its eternal teas, and lack of side dishes) is 
so utterly different from that to which they have 
been accustomed. It is not to be wondered at, 
therefore, if Germany, so akin in language, 
customs, and diet, and with its many Norwegian 
colonies, should take precedence over other 
countries as a Norwegian field for further light 
and learning. Copenhagen is too near the home, 
and heart, to be considered as a foreign town, and 



i6o HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

it is in its way a sort of Norwegian Brighton, 
without the beach and the faculty of being able 
to pronounce its ''r's." America, as previously 
pointed out, is considered more in the light of a 
last resort under certain desperate circumstances, 
and therefore as a sort of purgatorial half-way- 
house between Norway and Walhalla. His 
Majesty the King and his Government are, 
moreover, by no means partial to these irrepa- 
rable drainings of the nation's best blood, and the 
Herr Doktor has very plainly told his country- 
women that the strenuous life and strident climate 
of the United States have a dessicative effect on 
her native freshness. Her hair becomes dry and 
coarse, he tells her, her cheeks wan and pale, her 
eyes hollow, and she returns (if she ever returns) 
with a restlessness of manner and an expression 
of vague discontent quite foreign among her own 
people. Thus the Herr Doktor : and do you 
know I often think there is a good deal to be 
said for his contention. 

And what are these little home towns like ? 
They are certainly very picturesque, whatever 
else they may be, and you will never find any 
two of them situated, or looking quite alike. 
They dot the far-flung coast line of Norway 
from Fredrikshald to Vadso, with longer or 
shorter intervals between them as their special 



IN THE TOWNS r6i 

vocations have called them into being. You 
usually happen upon them with surprising sud- 
denness, and in places where you would least 
expect to see a town. Just when you have con- 
cluded that your pilot has gotten the steamboat 
into a cul de sac, and is about to try an overland 
route across a neighbouring skerry, an agglome- 
ration of little wooden structures will appear to 
the eye as if by magic, perched upon terraces of 
rock, and looking in their colours of red, yellow, 
and green, not unlike a collection of newly painted 
toy houses put out to dry ; or at the end of a long 
day's tramp through a wilderness of lakes and 
pine-barren bluffs, when you are beginning to 
fancy you have inadvertently passed your town 
by, and are seriously thinking of retracing your 
steps, a church bell tolling a decease, or a wed- 
ding, or a funeral, or some other melancholy 
circumstance will reveal its presence in the gorge 
under your very feet. And they are all planned 
more or less alike in so far as the conformation 
of the surroundings will admit. The market- 
place, or to'Tvet, faces the pier, and contains the 
raadhus (town hall), where the urban council sits ; 
the spare bank, where the hard-earned savings 
are (the Norse idiom is nothing if not virile) 
indskudt, or shot in ; the post-office, the telegraph 
and telephone offices, and the shop of the apothe- 
II 



1 62 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

cary. In the main, or High Street, is the one 
large Stores, which practically clothes, feeds, and 
furnishes the town, the hotel for the better-class 
travelling public — usually handelsreisender — and 
the other hotel with the gramophone, and the 
pocketless billiard-table for the more local 
clientele. A row of wharves with their crazy- 
looking ''sea-houses" on stilts extends from 
either side of the pier, and steam-launches, 
tugs, and fishing smacks come and go from early 
morning until late at night. Dominating the 
whole on a fertile and timbered eminence is 
the little Lutheran kirke, with its preposterously 
high steeple towering above the well-kept acre 
of the dead. Hard by is the gamle hjem, or 
almshouse for the aged poor, the schoolhouse, 
and the working-men's club, where the bazaars 
and the public balls are held. The main street 
becomes a high road opposite the portals of 
the church, and goes zigzagging off among the 
lakes and pine-barren bluffs of the interior in a 
seemingly indeterminate way, until some sudden 
sense of its duties to the public sends it hurrying 
back to the coast and the next town, where it 
becomes a main street again under similar clerical 
patronage. 

The tor vet has its usual groups of bonder who 
have driven their milk into the meieriet, or public 



IN THE TOWNS 163 

dairy, early that morning, and are garnering the 
latest outside news before returning to their 
gaards ; but they do not assimilate with the 
perennially lounging knots of sailors and fisher- 
men, waiting for a wind, or tidings of the long- 
expected shoals of mackerel or herring. With 
these exceptions and the usual bevy of children 
at play, or haply a couple of dogs chasing each 
other around the town fountain, there is scarcely 
any other living thing to be seen, everyone 
having his, or her, wage-earning task to perform 
for that day. The women who are not busy 
with domestic duties at home are, with few 
exceptions, hard at work in factories, hotels, 
business offices, coffee-shops, telegraph, postal, 
and telephone offices, and the petty shops of the 
town ; and they will not be in evidence until the 
meal hour, or the evening, or Sunday, sends 
them out into the streets. When women meet 
to discuss the outgoings and incomings of 
another woman, the first question that is usually 
put is, *' What does she do ? " and if on indisput- 
able evidence it is found that she does nothing, it 
will be good for that woman, failing independent 
means, if she tranfer her condition of dolce far 
niente to another town. The men are equally 
busy, and are as seldom to be seen in the narrow 
streets and public square as their sisters in work. 



i64 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

Thus the days, months, and years will pass 
without any epoch-making event to mark their 
progress beyond the seldom epidemic, or the still 
rarer, if more dreaded, fire — which will sweep the 
little wood-built town out of existence in the 
space of a night, and prepare the site for a new 
town built up of red brick. There is work for 
all in these little communities, and if it is not 
readily obtainable the authorities will find it for 
you, and plainly tell you, if you are physically 
sound, that you must take it or go into the State 
workhouse. In a poor country, where every 
individual has to bear his proportionate share of 
a crushing tax, your neighbour sees to it that he, 
at least, shall not contribute to any local outdoor 
relief on your account while you have the strength 
to handle a spade or break a stone. On a Sunday, 
in summer, and between the church services, the 
torvet, the pier, the quays, and the adjoining 
streets are filled with promenading bevys of 
well-dressed young girls (the women always pre- 
ponderate), chatting and laughing, and obviously 
in the rarest of high spirits, and the men stand 
about at the street corners, or in the middle of 
the torvet, in silent groups, with their hands in 
their pockets (their normal receptacles during 
inertia), smoking — everlastingly smoking — and 
noting the womenfolk with that superior air of 



m THE TOWNS 165 

condescension so peculiar to the lower-class 
Norwegian in his attitude towards the opposite 
sex. You will be seldom disturbed by the 
insistent attentions of a drunken man — never 
by the sight of a drunken woman — and the rags 
of penury are not affected, even by the poorest 
of the poor. An air of well-being and content 
seems to pervade on all sides, and that it is not 
assumed for the occasion is evidenced by the 
flushed cheeks and bright eyes of the women, 
and the expression of stolid satisfaction that 
characterizes the features and movements of the 
men. The evening is passed in visits to the 
cinema, boating trips on the fjord, a dance at 
the working-men's club, or in long walks through 
the moonlit aisles of the communal forest. 
Towards the close of the summer season a week's 
holiday is always to be had for the asking ; and 
then the town mouse will go out to its country 
relation and revel the period away amidst the 
unwonted emancipations of a mountain farm, 
the country mouse returning the visit to town 
when the cows have been housed for the long 
winter. At times a good-natured old uncle of a 
ship captain may even take a toil-worn and 
weakling girl on a free trip to London, and show 
her the Tower and the Crystal Palace of her 
school reader ; and that is an event to be remem- 



1 66 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

bered and talked over for many a long year to 
come. What mattered it to her if the outward 
trip was unduly prolonged by summer calms, or 
that contrary winds kept her beating about for a 
fortnight in the North Sea? She is used to the 
sea ; and the unheard of privilege of being able 
to sit, with the ship's cat, on deck, knitting, and 
watching the evolutions of the men — who with 
the captain were all of her town, and in a sense 
related — -more than made amends for the rather 
stuffy and higgledy-piggledy state of things 
which prevailed below. Besides, she has seen 
the world's greatest town — even London — and 
it would matter very little to her now when she 
died. But she does not die. Not a bit of her. 
The following winter she is as well and strong 
as ever, going to the bazaars and the dances, or 
partaking in toboggan, sleigh-driving, and ski- 
running expeditions with the best of them. 

In the three great towns of the country, in- 
cluding the capital, the same conditions prevail, 
though on a larger and more cosmopolitan scale. 
Even among the best families the woman always 
finds something ** to do " ; for the parents are not 
always velstaaende (prosperous), and the com- 
mercial and other paths which were formerly 
wholly pre-empted by the men have been opened 
and graciously smoothed for her intrepid feet. 



IN THE TOWNS 167 

You will find her everywhere — as school teacher, 
housekeeper, stationmaster, masseuse, doctor, 
chemist's assistant, typist, or attending university 
lectures with an eye to things even more ambi- 
tious. There are, besides, innumerable charitable 
and rescue institutions where she may find an 
outlet for her irrepressible energies should she be 
fortunate enough to possess independent means. 
But an increasing population, and a not too pros- 
perous state of trade, with their inevitable result 
in an ever-narrowing sphere for employment, puts 
her at times to sore straits for a means of a live- 
lihood. Yet, rather than become a burden on 
her struggling parents or the community, she 
will, if the worst comes to the worst, even go 
into service, knowing full well that the position 
carries no degradation in a household whereof 
the mistress will occasionally share the work of 
Xki^pige from the country. The latter knows of 
her unerring instincts how to keep her place, and 
to differentiate between her own status, that of 
the new lady pige, and the mistress who drops 
in during periods of stress to help peel the 
potatoes or mix a salad. The inherent vulgarity 
born of the public-house and low-class music-halls 
is conspicuously absent in Norway, and the cook 
who drinks, the maid who apes her social superiors, 
and the blousy old person of better days and a 



1 68 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

battered bonnet, who chairs, and never under 
any circumstances touches a drop, **so *elp 'er 
gracious ! " are, like the nightingale, not indi- 
genous. Poverty in town or country may mean 
the loss of many a little trifle that made up the 
sum of creature comfort, but it does not send 
indigent respectability down into the squalid 
deeps of shabby - gentility and questionable 
society. Blackguardism and crime have their 
allotted quarter in a few of the large towns in 
Norway, as they have in the towns of other 
countries, and they are usually to be found 
abutting the quays ; but they are as prescribed 
and segregate as the China towns of New York 
and San Francisco. 

In a comparatively large town, such as Chris- 
tiania, there are naturally a leisured few who, 
especially in winter, can always set apart an 
indefinite interval of time for pleasure pure and 
simple ; and there are a number of days and half 
days of public and other holidays — to say nothing 
of Sundays — which are also availed of by the less 
fortunate possessors of means. It would be a 
mistake to imagine that the system runs to all 
work and no play. There is play enough, though 
the thorough zest with which it is entered into 
would seem to point to there being very little 
to spare. 



IN THE TOWNS 169 

Then, how does the young lady of Christiania 
wile away her day during the winter solstice, and 
what constitutes her ideas as to play? Entre 
nous and fortified by my unbounded faith in the 
loyalty of my reader, I will tell you. She will, 
after having had her usual early morning cup of 
coffee, get up between the hours of nine and ten, 
when daylight is firmly established. She will 
then probably sit down to a breakfast consisting 
of bread and butter, an ^^^, a little bacon or a 
meat r6chauff6e, some cheese, and possibly a milk 
biscuit or two, with various kinds of marmalade 
and jam, washing down the whole with either 
coffee, tea, or chocolate. She will then, if the 
weather be fine, take her ski on her kjcelke (bob- 
sleigh) and go up to Majorstuen, the terminus of 
the trik, or electric railway, to Holmenkollen. 
There she will meet her veninde — as pre-arranged. 
Now a veninde, as applied to one of her own sex, 
is scarcely met by our own more general term 
''friend," or even chum, or comrade. It is far 
more intimate. Her veninde and herself are 
mutual repositories of confidences which an 
Englishwoman would hesitate to entrust to her 
best friend. This blood-sisterhood of the venindes 
is unique in its way. It takes rise at a very early 
age, and practically endures throughout life. It 
implies absolute loyalty towards one another in 



lyo HOME IJFE IN NORWAY 

all the affairs of life — including love ; and false 
indeed would be the veninde who ventured to set 
her cap at her veninde' s lover presumptive before 
the latter has been rejected as utterly impossible. 
Every young Norwegian girl, whether lady or 
peasant, who is worth her salt, has her veninde ; 
and their mutual correspondence when marriage 
or other reasonable cause has separated them 
in person, is a species of confidential informa- 
tion bureau for all that may socially transpire 
throughout the length and breadth of the land. 
The young man who takes up an appointment 
in distant Nordland may have put a good many 
hundred miles between himself and his fiancee in 
Christiania, and may consider himself in the 
minus position of the needle in the bundle of 
hay ; but she has her own trofast veninde in the 
folke skole, or the post-office, or the vicarage of 
that inconsequential little Nordland town, and 
I can tell that young man that it will be very 
necessary for him to look well to the p's and 
q's of his daily life. A friend of the masculine 
sex is a ven, a term which is rather elastic, 
according to the nature and degree of the friend- 
ship. It may merely rank a little above bekjendt 
(an acquaintance), or it may denote a sweet- 
heart ; but whatever its current value it must 
give place later on to for loved (betrothed) and 



IN THE TOWNS 171 

mand (husband). Our little leisured one having 
met her own very particular veninde, and possibly 
their vens (for you can never reckon on the 
incidence of these happenings), takes the car and 
goes off up to Holmenkollen or Frognersseter. 
There, if tobogganing be the order of the day, 
they proceed to indulge in that sport to the top 
of their bent, and at the risk of life and limb 
negotiate the dizzy descent of the Korketroekkeren 
(the Corkscrew), or the equally dangerous con- 
volutions of the Helvedesving (Hell's turning), 
without the least show of hesitation. The 
steering is entrusted to the veUy who holds a long 
tapering pole under his right arm and manipulates 
the trailing end to the right or the left after 
the manner of a rudder. They may consider 
themselves particularly fortunate if, when solving 
these bob-sleigh problems, they have not to 
apply to the ambulance station for splints and 
bandages and accompany one of their number 
to the nearest hospital. But in the wild delight 
of the moment this is never thought of, and it 
really concerns them less than it does ''pappa," 
who, in the columns of the town Press, never 
ceases to deplore the ever-increasing number of 
these toboggan casualties, and to denounce the 
authorities for their criminal supineness in the 



172 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

matter. If the fore (condition of the snow) is 
feathery and more suited to the ski — why, a ski- 
running expedition let it be by all means. Then 
with their skis firmly bound on, and knapsack 
on back, they will plunge into the forest wilds 
of Nordmarken, and by way of fjeld, defile, and 
frozen lake or brook, arrive at the ski-hut of 
their goal. Here they will boil their coffee and 
bring forth the contents of their knapsacks, 
which usually consist of smorrebrdd, cakes and 
oranges ; and then they will all sit down to 
have a real good time of it. The conversation 
waxes fast and furious, and they are all, to use 
their virile expressives, ** talking into one 
another's mouths," and enjoying themselves 
*' frightfully." Flirtation may follow as a very 
natural outcome of the situation. It may be 
guardedly flippant, and therefore innocuous, or it 
may be sentimentally mute, and consequently 
most dangerous. But what care they ? They 
are quite alone in this primitive little hut : 
alone with Nature, and themselves — and Mrs 
Grundy has not yet learned to run on ski. 
Perhaps, emulating a ven, the girls may even 
light up a cigarette. Possibly — I do not know. 
I should be loath to say. I have never yet 
seen one of them smoke in public ; but, as 



IN THE TOWNS 173 

we are all well aware, quae fuerant vitia mores 
sunt. 

And so back to town again, which our ex- 
hausted little veninde reaches in time for a late 
dinner, at 3 p.m. This family meal is seldom 
a mute affair. The young people see to that 
in their somewhat riotous review of the morning's 
fun; and, nolens volens, old bourgeois ''pappa" 
and his hustru (wife) are drawn into the con- 
versational melee, much to the benefit of their 
respective digestions. Quietude only supervenes 
after the disposal of the coffee, when the old 
people will indulge in a nap, and the girls, bring- 
ing forth their embroidery, carry on the discus- 
sion in a respectfully subdued tone of voice. 
Later on they will all go out for a stroll in the 
park or Karl Johan gade (the combined Regent 
Street and Bond Street of Christiania), and perhaps 
wind up the evening with a visit to the theatre. 
The old people have a decided preference for 
the downright comedies of their classic Holberg 
— which are decidedly Jonsonian of plot and 
sentiment — or a problem of Ibsen, a query from 
Bjornson, or, as a laxative, a less moralizing 
essay by a minor native dramatist ; and here the 
general public are thoroughly with them in their 
support of the National Theatre in its endeavour 



174 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

to inculcate and maintain a high standard of 
public taste. Nevertheless, neither the treasury 
receipts of the theatre, nor the morals of the 
public have been known to be adversely affected 
by an occasional appearance of the Geisha, or 
the boisterous indiscretions of Charley's amazing 
aunt. After the play papa is almost certain to 
treat them to a recherche little supper at the 
Teater Kafeen, and they do not in that case 
arrive home until the late, if normal, hour of 
twelve. 

When the evenings are passed en famille, 
music and reading are much indulged in, with 
intervals of tapestry weaving, or a game of 
'THombre," '' Boston," or even '' Bridge." But 
if a ball is on the tapis, then there will be no 
time for afternoon strolls, tapestry weaving, or 
anything else that is not of a preparatory nature 
for this greatest of all occasions. Balls are pre- 
ceded by a substantial supper, and commence 
not later than nine o'clock, when everybody is 
expected to arrive punctually to time. Light 
refreshments are served at twelve o'clock, and 
dancing usually comes to an end at 2 a.m., though 
there is, as may be supposed, no very hard-and- 
fast line drawn in that respect. There are no 
chaperons other than the hostess, who is respon- 



IN THE TOWNS 175 

sible for the behaviour of all her guests. At 
public balls, however, there are usually two 
chaperons who undertake that collective duty. 
The ball is generally opened with a polonaise, 
followed by all the usual modern dances ; but in 
Norway the waltz has always been the abiding 
favourite. Elderly people are as seldom in 
evidence at these functions as the wall-flower. 
Indeed the entire affair would seem to be for 
the exclusive benefit of the young people, who 
are certainly of the most tireless dancers of the 
peoples of the earth. Our little veninde is there 
as a matter of course, and despite her Holmen- 
kollen activities, tripping it with the merriest of 
them. She thinks nothing of attending three or 
four dances in the course of a week during the 
season, even if they result in a semi-somnolent 
condition of inertia during the hours of the sun. 
And she looks very nice indeed in a lovely 
creation (to me in confidence whispered) of white 
bobinet over a white silksatin, whatever that may 
be, though it might, and really does, pass in the 
brilliant light for the very best grade of silk. 
She has no need to be told how to conduct 
herself for the occasion, and as a young Nor- 
wegian lady should conduct herself in a 
Norwegian ballroom ; that it is bad form, for 



176 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

instance, to engage herself beforehand for all the 
dances on her card ; to remove her gloves, except 
at table ; to assent to a gentleman (who may not 
know better) dancing with her on two consecutive 
occasions, or while dancing to look her partner 
too frequently in the face, or, under any circum- 
stances whatever, to lay her head on his manly 
shoulder. And the gentleman (who is by no 
means permitted to have it all his own way) is 
particularly cautioned, when she refuses him a 
dance, not to commit the Mtise of engaging the 
lady sitting by her side. He will be good enough 
to go back to the place from whence he came, 
there to remain until he shall have recovered 
sufficiently to engage somebody else. Common 
politeness will also demand of him that he shall 
not always dance with the young lady with whom 
it might seem to him to be a necessity of his life 
that he must always dance, or to dance so often 
with any one lady as to evoke general observa- 
tion, if not surmise. They are both of them 
adjured to refrain from continuing in a round 
dance until they must perforce gasp for the 
breath of life, and that during the Kontredans 
(Les Lanciers) they must give that necessary 
attention to their movements which the grace- 
demanding evolutions of that figure is rather 



IN THE TOWNS 177 

particular about. All this and the dangers 
attending the drinking of iced drinks when she 
is heated, our little veninde has already learned 
of her natural aptitudes ; and for the rest, I thank 
you, she is quite capable of taking care of herself 



12 



CHAPTER XII 

OUT OF DOORS 

THE time-bound tourist racing along the 
beaten routes from Christiania, Bergen, 
Trondhjem, or Skien, when Norway is at 
its hottest (and dustiest) sees little enough of the 
home beyond that which may be noted in 
crowded hotels where the management and staff 
have been temporarily brought together to meet 
the summer occasion ; and his fjordal brother of 
the steam-yacht, or so-called '' floating hotel," 
who, in the intervals of conducted raids on local 
waterfalls and ancient churches, eats and sleeps 
aboard, is no whit better informed. For it is 
precisely at this period of the year that the 
Norwegian townsman also converts himself into 
a tourist in his own or some other country, or 
retires to his upland villa, or to his favourite 
watering-place : leaving his business and his 
home respectively to his managing clerk and the 
servants. As for the bonde, or peasant, and his 
"little lot," they are practically non est so far as 
the British tourist and his pursuit of home life 

»79 



i8o HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

data are concerned ; for they have bundled out 
of their home, or vaaningshus, into the bryggehus 
(an auxihary dwelling) for the work of the 
summer, or they have locked up both establish- 
ments and gone off to their mountain annexe, the 
sceter^ where the en deshabille requirements of 
their vocations may render them less eager of 
domiciliary visit. Not that they are inaccessible. 
Far from it. The Norwegian gentleman's sense 
of hospitality is at all seasons of the most con- 
crete, as many a dyspeptic tourist has found to 
his cost, and his villa is as freely '* at your dis- 
position " as that of the proudest hidalgo of Old 
Spain : which he is at pains to tell you, with 
interminable ''skaals," boldly, naturally,, and 
without the least arridre pensde. Not so the 
peasant. He is always very pleased to see you, 
or anybody else, at any time, convenient or 
otherwise, and his wife will place before you 
sufficient food and drink to maintain a small 
family for a week ; but her husband will not tell 
you that he is always very pleased to see you, or 
that his house, and its larder, are permanently at 
your disposition. He expects that you will know 
all this, in reason, and without the telling ; and 
he will, moreover, expect the same consideration 
from you should he drop in upon you in town 
later on. He is a dour, taciturn man, whose 




ANCIENT WOODKN CHURCH AT FANTOFT, NKAR liEKCEN 



OUT OF DOORS i8i 

only fault from the tourist's point of view is his 
insatiable curiosity as to your age, occupation, 
and the intimate concerns of your home life. 
His wife and his daughter, if he have any — and 
he always does manage to have them — will not 
participate to any extent in this inquisition. As 
gossips they are merely so many charming 
accessories after the fact. 

Nevertheless a good deal of the domestic 
affairs of the summer peasant may come within 
the ken of anyone who will bear in mind that the 
entire country from the North Cape to Cape 
Lindesnses is practically free to all and sundry 
who have the average endowment of tact. There 
are no rights-of-way in Norway in the strict 
English sense of the term, and woods, plains, 
mountains, hills, standing lakes, and dales, are 
the common property of tramp and tourist alike, 
provided tilled lands are respected and no fires 
lit within, or in the neighbourhood of, sun-baked 
forests. Therefore have I been oftentimes 
diverted during cross-country tours by the sight 
of Pater- and Mater-familias Britannicus and their 
progeny stumping along a dusty main road 
during their between-meal constitutionals, quite 
oblivious of the fact that the innumerable paths 
leading up to the farms on the beautiful and 
breezy hills above them were public thorough- 



i82 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

fares, and that a friendly '*drop in" at any of 
the said farms would be very far from unwelcome. 
I have even been so temerous as to stay the 
procession in its stolid career and explain the 
position succinctly and in detail to them ; but 
seldom with any favourable result. 

** Oh really," Pater-familias might say, with an 
apprehensive glance at my coUarless shirt, " how 
very funny ! " 

'' But they've got dangerous cows, and that 
sort of thing, haven't they ? " Mater-familias 
might put in, as she noted my omission of that 
morning's shave. '* I hate cows — dangerous 
cows I mean." And with an '' It wouldn't do in 
our country — what " from the progeny the pro- 
cession would resume the even, and dusty, tenor 
of its way. 

The home instinct with its *' Hi, measter ! 
That beant no public pa-ath," was too strong 
within them to be overcome by the mere sug- 
gestion of an unshorn countryman, a stranger, 
and without a collar to his shirt. 

The disintegrating effect of summer upon the 
home life in Norway is pretty much the same as 
in other lands. Everybody who can afford it dis- 
appears for the nonce from the ken of everybody 
who cannot afford it, and the stay-at-homes are as 
seldom at home as they can possibly help. It is 



OUT OF DOORS 183 

the dead hand of winter that brings Norsemen 
together under the roof -tree and evokes that 
love of the hjem, which is in no wise inferior in 
tenderness to that of their Germanic kin of the 
south ; and it is therefore from the close of the 
tourist season until the commencement of the 
spring ploughing that the people are "at home" 
in the more intimate sense of the word. Weather 
conditions being favourable, that is to say normal, 
the outdoor country is, in my opinion, at its best 
in early June and September — before and after 
the advent and departure of the tourist. It is 
difficult to write other than in superlatives when 
the former month with its genial temperature and 
glorious wealth of bloom is under consideration. 
In Lowland, and especially coastal Norway to 
the south, the length of the seasons proximate 
very closely to our own. Winter begins 
after the October rains and is practically at 
an end in April or the middle of May ; and 
although a cold snap may set in after February 
its duration, owing to the sun's increasing alti- 
tude, is seldom prolonged. The final ''clean 
up " of the winter ice and snow is certainly not 
favourable for sight-seeing, except so far as the 
swollen grandeur of the waterfalls and rivers, 
with their log freights, is concerned, and it is 
just then probably that Norway is at its worst 



1 84 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

from the pedestrian's point of view. Yet it is 
astonishing how quickly and adeptly sun, rain, 
and a belated fall of snow will act the scavenger 
and sweep the whole soiled mass of frigidity into 
the seas. 

" What a pity it is that the English tourist 
does not come out to us earlier in June," peasants 
have remarked to me many a time and oft. 
*' They would then see our country at its very 
best, when the roads are free from dust, the 
waterfalls and cascades at their grandest, and the 
hills and meadows unshorn. But I suppose they 
put it off until July and August because they are 
afraid of the cold.'' 

Now a pretty intimate knowledge of both 
countries has long since convinced me that on 
this question of tolerating cold — to say nothing 
of heat — the average Englishman is no less 
hardy than the Norwegian, if not hardier. This 
may seem very like heresy to those who have 
been imbued with a sense of the superlative 
hardiness of the Hardy Norseman. '' English- 
men and dogs," saith the Spaniard, ''always 
walk on the sunny side of the street," and it 
would be rude to contradict him. This idiosyn- 
crasy, however, would not excite undue remark 
on a hot summer's day in Norway ; but I can 
vouch for the Britisher's predilection to braving 



OUT OF DOORS 185 

the worst possible winter weather just for the 
mere "fun of the thing" when no Norwegian, to 
say nothing of the dog, would think of abandon- 
ing his place by the stove. Personally I have 
always gone about in the coldest of winters in 
South and South- East Norway sans overcoat 
and gloves (to the unmitigated astonishment of 
the native) without experiencing any particular 
discomfort — though to drive without them would 
have been folly — for I soon found that a brisk 
walk in the frostiest weather (provided that it be 
bright, clear, and windless) will always give to 
one the required degree of circulation. Of 
course durinof blizzard-time or cold weather in 
the highlands this would be impossible, but I am 
writing now from the point of view of a resident 
in the more genial coastal districts. Neither can 
I remember ever having been laid up between 
blankets with a cough, or a severe cold, although 
I have a very lively recollection of my annual 
three days in bed, and the bronchitis kettle, when 
I have resided in London. During the winter 
season in Norway a peasant, whether in comfort- 
able circumstances or in receipt of outdoor relief, 
would never dream of going to bed in a room 
wherein there was no fire in the stove, and 
stoves are kept going all day long in the draught- 
proof living rooms as a matter of course. Con- 



1 86 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

trast this with the lot of thousands of EngHsh 
famiHes (not always of the poor) whose bedrooms 
are innocent of fires in the coldest of weathers, 
and whose draughty living-rooms, of the jerry- 
built type, can never be quite heated to comfort 
pitch. The Norwegian business man of the 
towns has no urgent call to face inclement 
weather. The town he may happen to be living 
in is, comparatively speaking, a small one, his 
office with its clerks and telephones often adjoins 
his drawing-room, and a visit to the bourse, 
theatre, club, or house of a friend is only a 
matter of a few hundred yards' walk, or drive, 
well wrapped in furs. The London merchant, 
or clerk, on the other hand, has to turn out of 
his suburban home in any kind of winter weather 
— indeed his presence in the house after 9 a.m. 
(bronchitis apart) is almost resented as a sort of 
breach of faith. He has then to await trains on 
cold wind-swept railway platforms, and pass the 
greater part of the day amid perfect maelstroms 
of icy draughts. Granted that Norway, thermo- 
metrically considered, has a far colder winter 
climate, that of England, and especially London, 
is the more dangerous of the two. It would not be 
too wide of the mark to say that with our houses 
and their heat-wasting open fire places there are 
few among us who, in his inner conscience, 



OUT OF DOORS 187 

may truthfully affirm that he is really quite able 
to get that amount of even permanent warmth 
which his nature demands of him. The Nor- 
wegian from time immemorial has adapted his 
house and its heating arrangements to meet 
winter conditions, and whatever his circum- 
stances he has no occasion to go '* freezing 
around " on the grin-and-bear-it system so widely 
in vogue in practical England. Verily is Norway 
a country wherein to keep warm of winters. 
But you can have too much even of the best of 
good things ; and the Norwegian peasant has it 
when he fires up his stove to cremation point, 
and suffers in consequence from chronic Krim 
or colds. 



CHAPTER XIII 

DARKER NORWAY 

THE Charity of Norway is without bounds. 
I have been told by a minor official in a 
small town that his salary of 2000 kroner 
a year would have been more than ample for 
the upkeep of himself, his home, family, and 
servant, were it not for the constant appeals on 
behalf of necessitous cases scarcely within the 
scope of the poor laws, or the benevolent bequests 
of that district. The catalogue was certainly long 
and miscellaneous, including as it did contributions 
to widows of fishermen who (often with all their 
sons) had been lost at sea, bazaars in aid of home 
and foreign missions, the setting up of a local 
bonde, who had been burned out of house and 
home, the provision of a new fishing smack, 
or a new net, for a struggling fisherman with a 
sick wife and a host of children, earthquakes in 
Italy, raffles on behalf of the sick and helpless, 
floods in France, a town wiped out by fire further 
along the coast, et hoc genus omne. In addition 

to these there were the constant little outlays for 

189 



I90 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

birthday presents for his family, and his neigh- 
bours' families, confirmation presents and wedding 
presents, in all their metalliferous, and jewelled 
stages ; and of course there were the innumerable 
Christmas, New Year, and kindred seasonable 
offerings. They had all to be contributed to, ay, 
and to the last farthing. The only consolation 
remaining to him (though I am bound to say he 
looked remarkably well on it) was that everybody 
else had to do the same thing, and that they were 
all, therefore, in the same condition of financial 
depletion. And I quite believed him. The 
bymand would seem to be thoroughly imbued 
with the Dickensian sentiment (his daughters 
have read their " Boz " from cover to cover) in 
these matters, and his wife and the said daughters 
love to figure as Dame Durdens and Lady 
Bountifuls in hospitals, slums, or the cottages of 
the respectable indigent. They have no ear, nor 
heart, for latter-day theories of the lethal chamber 
for the physically unfit, and will tell you, with a 
blaze of indignation, if you are rash enough to 
broach the subject, that if the '' Herre Gud " 
above them is as mindful of one of these soul- 
containing little cripples as He is of a sparrow, 
or a blade of grass, it will be a dangerous venture 
indeed for any one of us to hamper Him in His 
polity ; and, moreover, that you ought to be 



DARKER NORWAY 191 

thoroughly well ashamed of yourself — so there ! 
And there you absolutely are. It would almost 
seem i^pace the evolutionist) as though the very 
virility of the race, such as we have it in Norway 
in a high degree, is rather a result, than other- 
wise, of these fostering tendences. 

And I also quite agreed with this minor official 
of the nominal 2000 kroner a year, after discuss- 
ing the subject from every point of view, that 
there was no conceivable way of avoiding these 
charities — more especially having in mind the 
vast centrifugal powers of the great bourgeois 
machine before alluded to ; and when, after selling 
me half-a-dozen 50 ore lottery tickets for a house 
and furniture for which I really had no use, he 
complained that whereas he, as a bymand, had 
to contribute in cash, the bonde invariably did so 
in kind, I was thoroughly with him in his plaint. 
For in all the years I have known the bonde I 
have never seen him (rich or poor) take a farthing 
piece from his purse and bestow it on anyone 
poorer than himself I am willing to swear an 
affidavit on that. If it should reach his ears 
that the Herr Grosserer, or some half-demented 
Englsender, has contributed fifty kroner to a 
worthy cause he will merely remark that they 
might well have made it a hundred, or even a 
thousand kroner, of their superfluity. He looks 



192 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

upon it as an act less of charity than self-right- 
eous ostentation. To me this bonde has always 
remained a paradox in his views on petty economy, 
or la haute finance. As previously hinted he 
may have his purse well filled with monies, and 
yet never think of giving the least fraction of it 
away to mute want — who would, as certainly 
never dream of appealing to him for it ; but he 
will tell it (if he should notice it) to go home 
to his kona (wife), knowing full well that it 
will get all it needs of food, with perhaps an 
old skirt or a pair of stockings thrown in on 
her own account. And if he have no monies it 
will make no difference ; there will be yet of 
food, and to spare in his larder, and mute 
want may run away off to his gaard and help 
itself to all it can physically contain. The same 
economics apply to his Kona. If his purse be 
stuffed to repletion with paper, bronze or nickel, 
it will make no manner of difference to her. 
He has his decided opinion on the policy of en- 
trusting a wife with specie. She can go to the 
Landhandlertet, where he owes a great deal 
more than he ought to, and see if she can coax 
a pair of new boots, or some dress material, out 
of the landhandler on the strength of her mand's 
alleged windfall. If he have no available cash, 
and the landhandler remains obdurate, why then 



DARKER NORWAY 193 

she may go without — just as he has got to do. 
The wife of the farm labourer, or the pladsmand, 
or the husmand, in urgent need of cash, can go to 
a neighbour of same degree and wash, bake, or 
sew for it, provided that it do not interfere with 
her home duties ; and there will be no disgrace 
attached to this work ; for the wives, or 
daughters, of the said farm labourer, pladsmand 
or husmand, may have to come and wash, bake, 
or sew for her when her mand is known to 
possess coin ; for which services bonde etiquette 
demands that he shall pay in good mint of the 
realm. Again, and with very few exceptions, 
should the bonde become suddenly, and unex- 
pectedly, rich through the death of a relation, or 
other form of luck, he will not be satisfied until 
he has lost the whole in wild-cat speculation, 
with the certain prospect of remaining up to his 
ears in debt for the rest of his life. I am not so 
certain but that this last trait is not, to a large 
extent, national, and despite the Herr Grosserer's 
very indignant disclaimer, '' Don't talk to me 
about stormand's galskab " — or the mania for 
being of greater consequence than you actually 
are — ** in connection with these bonde folk ! " he 
will angrily exclaim when he, so to speak, " flies 
off the handle" at the suggestion, ''It's nothing 
of the kind. We may, in a measure, and of 
13 



194 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

certain notorious instances, have merited that 
term of reproach ; but with these bonder it Is quite 
another thing altogether. It is nothing more 
nor less than vulgar ostentation ! " Finally, the 
bonde in his dealings with vexel obligationer (bills) 
is no less inscrutable of financial procedure ; for 
he will back them with the same cheerful avidity 
which he will look for, and get, from a relation 
or a neighbour. But when it comes to a ques- 
tion of a bargain, be it a horse, a parcel of land, 
an old brass-cased watch, or a marriage settle- 
ment, you will find none shrewder, none more 
litigious, if law-knowing, and none more claimant 
for both ends of the stick of contention than 
the Norwegian bonde. Yet his alms are always 
forthcoming, if always in kind ; and here it is 
just possible that he exhibits a greater degree of 
shrewdness than the bymand is disposed to give 
him credit for. 

There are no pawnbroker shops in the country 
districts as might be inferred among communities 
where the credit system is the only possible 
system that may shelve indefinitely a general 
cataclysm of the home life. The Landhandleriet, 
or Handels husi, as the bonde calls it, is its rural 
substitute, and the landhandler s complaisance 
the only source of relief outside the fattig 
kasse, or poor-box. I have the honour to 



DARKER NORWAY 195 

account a number of these landhandlers among 
my personal friends, and during many years' ex- 
perience of their methods of doing business, I 
can aver with some degree of authority that I 
have only in very rare instances known one to 
abuse his position. They usually run the post 
office and telephone station of the village, 
and of course supply every description of food, 
clothing, implement, and utensil likely to be 
required by the villagers. The latter are very 
extensively on the '' Dr " side of their books, but 
provided that they pay something on account 
from time to time, and do not outstay the three 
years' limitation as ordained by statute, they are 
permitted to muddle through as best they can. 
What the landhandler may not know about their 
private or business affairs is certainly not worth 
the knowing, and as adviser and friend in con- 
nection with his dispensary for the necessaries 
of their lives, his status is far more essential, in 
the eyes of his humble clientele, than that of 
lensmand, prcesty or other official of the State. 

The charity, or benevolence, of the towns 
usually takes the form of legats (bequests) and 
stiftelser (institutions) under stated and proper 
control. There are no fewer than three hundred 
of these in the chief towns, and they embrace 
every conceivable class of social need, from 



196 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

night-refuges for men and women to distressed 
widows and daughters of Government officials. 
These, again, are supplemented by the untiring 
efforts of the ubiquitous Salvation Army, which 
has its branches in most of the towns. Its slum 
creche in Maridalsvein, Christiania, is one of 
the marvels of what organized charity may 
accomplish in that field ; and the ceaseless 
strivings of their ''Brigadier" Froken Othilie 
Tonning on behalf of Norway's submerged tenth 
have gained for her the unstinted praise of all 
her country-men. And Norwegians, I may tell 
you, have brought the art of laudatory comment 
to a very high degree of perfection ; as witness : 
" She is like the fresh wind. She blows away 
all obstacles. Put her in front of a precipice, 
and she will manage to scramble up and over it. 
She induces people to come forward, she induces 
money from them : for she is the right ' man ' 
in the right place. She is whole-hearted, self- 
negatory, pushful, not to say driving, She is 
the leader of the Salvation Army's work among 
the poor and the lost of our country." And it 
might well have been added without unduly 
straining the epithetical tension of the eulogy 
that she is only what the Norwegian lady ever is, 
at her best. 

Nevertheless, and without in the least desiring 



DARKER NORWAY 197 

to stultify these good works (which are, after all, 
only according to the measure of the forth- 
coming means), one cannot help wishing that 
some portion of them, whether in the form of 
legat, stiftelse, or heart's-ease, might be extended 
to sickness and sorrow in the dreary solitudes 
of upland Norway. The wish has often been 
borne in upon my mind with peculiar poignance 
when, seated by the bedside of some poor 
creature in extremis, in a wretched one-roomed 
cabin, noting the ordered squalor of the apart- 
ment and its tin-pot furniture, hearing the rains 
beating unceasingly down (my thoughts reverting 
by sheer contrast to my last selskabial dissipa- 
tion), I have suddenly caught the look of terrible 
unease and mute appeal from the moaning one 
on its miserable pallet of skin and straw. Be- 
lieve me, it is not always as one sees it during 
the tourist season, or in the roseate pages of the 
optimist, summering it in the gaard of some 
comparatively speaking well-to-do and happier 
family, near the beaten route. There are valleys 
in Norway within a day's journey of the coast 
towns wherein the tourist, and the Herr Grosserer, 
have seldom or never set foot. There are 
elderly and very old people — chiefly women — 
in these valleys who have never seen these 
coast towns, nor any other towns, and are 



198 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

without the least prospect of ever seeing one 
before they pass away. To babble to these 
poor landlocked ones of the marvels of the 
railroad, or the motor car, or the gambols of the 
mighty liner upon the storm-tossed and salt sea, 
and note the same look of gratuitous incredulity 
which probably adorned the face of the old lady 
who contemned the flying-fish hallucination in 
favour of the discovery of Pharaoh's chariot- 
wheels in the Red Sea, has been to me a 
source of pleasure long drawn out ; and I may 
have possibly (Heaven forgive me for it!) im- 
proved on the occasion. These people are 
invariably poor, hopelessly in debt, and withal 
of a condition of penury that passeth all metro- 
politan conception ; for it never whines under 
the worst conditions — never appeals. After all, 
the beaten routes provide but an infinitesimal 
portion to the knowledge we possess of the 
great buried life of the hidden dais. I have 
lived in them, these darkling valleys, summer 
out, winter in, and may, who knows ? have 
learned to anticipate to some little extent the 
suppressed cry, or divine the veiled, if anguished 
look. In one such valley as these, a narrow, 
treeless canon — a ruin of bog and fallen boulder, 
under almost ceaseless summer rains — with 
granite walls standing sheer three thousand feet 




P4 
H 

O 

2 



^ < 

O c/: 

^ Pi 
O 

; ^ 
Pi 

M H 

o ^ 

2 O 

Pi 



DARKER NORWAY 199 

high on either side, the walled-out sun shone 
not on my dwelling for four long winter months, 
and the half-a-score farmers (save the mark !) 
who subsisted on the breeding of a few sheep 
and goats, and the produce of their Crusoe-like 
patches of corn, could neither read nor write. 
But their children could, and can ; for the 
authorities have since their day put up a little 
schoolhouse, with a harmonium, in the bottom 
of this well, and the illiterate old may now see 
a schoolmaster there, who washes his face and 
hands three times a day, and wears a double 
linen collar. Is it at all surprising that in this 
wilderness of inhabited, if uninhabitable crevices, 
little children should at times sicken, die, and 
be buried away in some hallowed spot, without 
medical attendance or certificate of death, and 
remain there an entire season without benefit 
of clergy ; or that telling of these things, and 
of the home life of these forgotten ones to 
Norwegians of the town, I was as one speaking 
by the card of conditions of living which they 
had never seen or even dreamed of? And 
there is no one to blame ; no one but these 
pig-headed, uncomplaining ones of the crevices, 
who will not abandon their impossible pursuits 
and homes, the pursuits and homes of their 
impossible forefathers, and come down within 



200 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

some better hailing distance of the Herr Doktor, 
the Herr Praest, or his curate, the kapellan. 
The Government is certainly not to blame. No 
Government has a better and more up-to-date 
series of laws designed to meet this very con- 
dition of things. So conscientious is it about 
doing the right thing towards the public that 
it is continually revising, adding to, or repealing 
these laws at the bidding of bymand or bonde 
alike, and to an extent that renders it very 
difficult at times for the pig-headed ones to 
know, without legal assistance, where they really 
are. If, as has happened, such a little com- 
munity as the above-mentioned should become 
bankrupt, and appeal to the Government to save 
its life, its cry will not have been uttered in 
vain, and the Government will even subsidise 
their little second-hand lake steamer, running 
at an annual deficit, in order that they may 
attend the church, or land their sheep and goats 
at the distant lake head. But the Government 
cannot do impossibilities. Were it to adopt 
West Ham principles and provide roads, steamers, 
motor cars, railways, churches, hospitals, and free 
libraries for every one of these little crevices, 
with the necessary officials to look after them, 
why, there would be no Government left. They 
have got to be reasonable, these marooned ones. 



DARKER NORWAY 201 

They cannot have it both ways. And they are 
reasonable, for they never complain. Indeed, if 
you took them in the bulk you might possibly be 
tempted to say that they were happy — in that 
condition of lugubrious felicity which may be 
even born of hopelessness. But there are in- 
dividual exceptions that would damn all proof 
as to any rule obtaining, and it is the mute 
tribute of these derelict ones that makes for 
pity. The prcest has his work more than 
cut out for him among his three parishes, 
with the three services required of him 
during alternate weeks in the three separate 
churches, and that very often without the assist- 
ance of a kapellan. His duties outside his pulpit 
are very onerous indeed, and he is constantly in 
sleigh or carriole attending at councils, weddings, 
funerals, and the bedside of the sick and the 
dying, and is, generally speaking, run off his 
legs. If these duties and the stress of weather 
do not admit of his attendance at one of these 
distant crevices to administer the last rites or 
bury the dead, no undue surprise may be ex- 
hibited at the omission. He is bound to, and 
will, come as soon as circumstances admit, and 
he will perform the earth to earth ceremonial 
with all due solemnity, and with, perhaps, a 
touching tribute to the virtues of their dear 



202 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

brother departed. So that is right, and there can 
be really nothing to complain about; and you must 
remember that they are even worse off farther 
north, in Sweden, where the coffins are put away 
into a store-house until the spring and summer 
warmth admits of the frost-bound earth being 
opened to receive them. The Herr Doktor is 
no whit better off in the matter of leisure time. 
His district of visitation often comprises a dal 
extending to nearly a hundred miles in length. 
But he has his appointed places of attendance 
throughout his district on certain appointed days 
of the week, and there he is prepared to attend 
to patients who are capable of walking or driving 
to the gaardy wherein he dispenses his medicine 
or undertakes minor operations. If the case is 
serious, the patient must go into town to the 
sykehus (hospital) at his own charge, or if indi- 
gent, on a certificate from the commune. And 
just here the legat and the stiftilse would come 
in with immense benefit to many a sick one jolted 
along mountain roads, in and out of lake steamers 
and brake-vans on his or her excruciating day's 
journey to the town hospital. An auxiliary half- 
^2.y-sykehus at the conjunction of some of these 
dais would be an inestimable boon to many a 
poor creature, to whom a long and tedious journey 
would otherwise mean serious complications. But 



DARKER NORWAY 203 

there are occasions when the sick of these distant 
crevices will give no sign, will not send for the 
Herr Doktor under any amount of amiable in- 
timidation ; or the cost entailed in fetching the 
Herr Doktor from the outside world to an almost 
hopeless case will only add to debts already in- 
superable. Then the little one sick will die, and 
there is no more to be said about it. Irresistibly 
the legat, the stiftilse, and, above either, the in- 
domitable qualities of the Norwegian towns- 
woman thoroughly roused come into the mind 
in this connexion, and to her (for she is now of 
the State) I commend the case of the stricken 
children of the bonde poor in all humbleness. 
The methods of the Salvation Army, however 
well-meaning, will scarcely apply here. The 
bonde farmer is pious enough, and he has his lay 
preachers and revivalist apostles in profusion. 
He is, moreover, apt to slaa seg vrang (get his 
back up) at what he would consider an unwar- 
rantable invasion of the privacies of his home 
life. But his womenkind understand. The good 
work must be undertaken unostentatiously, almost 
of stealth, with the possibility of personal hard- 
ship and rebuff. But with the advice of \h^ prcsst 
and his Frue, the Herr Doktor, and, above all, 
the Jordmor, the local midwife and faithful friend 
and confidant of the bonde woman, there may be 



204 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

yet conveyed some measure of hope and comfort 
to the individual wrecks of many a distant vale. 

When the prcBst is not available the funeral 
obsequies are arranged and carried out with all 
decency by the family and friends of the deceased. 
Women, other than the nearest relatives, and not 
always then, do not follow in the procession to 
the graveyard. The guests meet at the house 
of the departed at about ii a.m., when a sub- 
stantial meal is served to them. They after- 
wards assemble in the best room, where the 
coffin lies, and hymns are intoned and tributes to 
the dead delivered with a simple fervour that will 
often move the sympathies more effectually than 
the finest rhetorical effort. The coffin is then 
borne out and deposited on a sleigh, or cart, 
according to the season of the year, and the pro- 
cession moves away to the little patch of conse- 
crated ground on the hillside under a towering 
fjeld. Here some further hymns are sung and 
speeches are made at the graveside, and then 
the work of interment is begun. The friends of 
the deceased, dispensing with the services of a 
sexton, take spades and reverentially fill in the 
vacant space, heaping the mould and shaping 
it with all the adeptness born of their tilling 
experiences. A last hymn is then sung, and the 
mourners, kneeling in the snow or soil, remain 



DARKER NORWAY 205 

for an interval in silent prayer. In the northern 
parts of Telemarken I have seen these kneeling 
mourners mark with their forefingers the sign of 
the cross on the shaped sides of the grave, as 
they rose to their feet : some old-time ceremonial, 
possibly, now quite forgotten. Then the wreaths 
of spruce leaves, interwoven with ribbon and 
tinsel, are brought forward and laid on the grave, 
and the mourners return to the house of the dead 
one, where they are again provided with all the 
refreshments they require. It would have been 
done better, they will say, if the Herr Prsest had 
been there. But the Herr Praest trusts them 
to see that the first portion of the service is 
carried out properly ; and he will be there among 
them in the spring to complete matters, as surely 
as the first anemone shall herald his approach. 
There is nothing much the matter with the 
Norwegian Herr Doktor and Prsest, more 
especially when one remembers that these brave 
fellows will cheerfully undertake a four days' 
winter journey, at risk of life and limb, across 
the frozen fjelds and storm-lashed estuaries 
of the far north to reach the bedside of the 
sick and the dying. But they cannot undertake 
impossibilities. 

The very poor of the larger towns, and 
especially Christiania, are as well provided for 



2o6 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

during the bitter months of winter, as they can 
reasonably expect. In their homes, when they 
possess one, they seem to subsist almost exclu- 
sively on bread-and-butter and coffee — especially 
coffee ; and they have no particular relish for 
melkemat, or milk food, as they contemptuously 
term it. But there are occasions when they are 
bound to take what they can get, and then a 
Salvation Army, or other mission, ticket iox gr'dd 
and milk at the local porridge station is by no 
means to be despised. The numerous public 
charities and private philanthropies of a people 
in whom the bump of benevolence is so pheno- 
menally developed see to it that want shall not 
stare them too painfully in the face ; and what- 
ever the results of the labour exchanges in 
England may be, here in Norway they have 
certainly met the objects for which they were 
intended. The Salvation Army has also pro- 
vided quarters for the homeless, where they may 
obtain a night's lodging for 25 ore, and the home 
missions furnish 2, 3, and 4 kroner tickets for 
provisions, or coals, which are negotiable at 
certain shops. There is even a landsforening 
for the, one would have thought hopeless, object 
of inducing tramps to settle down, and for taking 
charee of their children. The members of this 
forening pay a subscription of a krone a year, 



DARKER NORWAY 207 

and the society has several colonies in the being 
for the fostering and teaching of these little ones, 
each home containing from thirty to forty chil- 
dren. One of these homes or colonies is near Fred- 
riksvaern, not far from the seaport town of Larvik, 
and is well worth a visit by those interested in 
such matters. Tramp families have settled down 
to some extent near these refuges, and some of 
their members have even taken to work with a 
new sense of relish. The hospitals of the towns, 
and especially the great epidemi-sykehus of 
Ullevaal, outside Christiania, are ample for all 
requirements, and are of course conducted on 
similar up-to-date lines to those of other en- 
lightened lands. Neither have the cripples been 
forgotten, and the quite palatial " Sophies Minde," 
in the form of a hjem for van/ore (cripples' 
home) is one of the many evidences of good 
work undertaken or inspired by the Norsewoman. 
The confirmed inebriate in both classes of town 
society has no occasion to continue in that ab- 
normal condition of body and mind while there 
is an inebriates' home to receive him. A private 
forening has built several of these alkoholisthjeniy 
where the well-to-do may endeavour to turn 
over a new leaf for a consideration of about 200 
kroner a month, and there is another provided 
by the State, on almost gratis terms, to one and 



2o8 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

all who may desire to be rid of their complaint. 
But in the gratis homes, of which there are 
several, the inmates must work. Among these 
last is the *' Stiftelse Em?naus Arbeidshjem 
for kj em lose drikfceldige mcend som vil reises " 
(Emmaus Institute for homeless inebriates, will- 
ing to be reclaimed). The institution, which is 
on a religious basis, was founded in 1907 by a 
number of private people, and does not appeal to 
the public for support. The patients are selected 
exclusively from those who, as set forth, are 
inebriates and destitute of home, and applications 
from would-be paying patients are invariably 
refused. The period of voluntary incarceration 
is two years. There is no physical restraint of 
any kind imposed — beyond the absence of intoxi- 
cants — and kindly suasion is the principle with 
which the principal, Herr Jonas Pettersen, seeks 
(and with extraordinary success) to obtain his 
ends. Some of the worst characters from the 
town slums have been dealt with successfully at 
the institute's working colony near Seterstoen 
station, and, supplied with new clothes, and a 
situation found for them, they have gone back 
into the world as respectable and useful members 
of society. 

The '* Sanitetforening," assisted by the great 
body of the people, wages unceasing war against 




PROCESSION OF CHILDREN ON THE NATIONAL FETE DAY, MAY 17 



DARKER NORWAY 209 

the common enemy, consumption. Legats for 
this object alone amount to over a million kroner. 
Each year the forening sends out millions of 
little artificial maiblomst (May flowers) which are 
retailed at 10 ore each. The flower is worn on 
the lappel of the coat or blouse, and they may 
be obtained anywhere. Little school children 
vend them from door to door, and on the great 
national fete day. May 17, when whole armies of 
children march in procession through the streets 
of all towns and villages, with flags flying and 
bands playing, the little maiblomst is almost as 
conspicuous as the confetti. Stamps of the 
ordinary postage kind, only somewhat larger, 
and with a portrait of some well-known 
Norwegian (such, for instance, as Bjornstjerne 
Bjornson) on the face, have been sanctioned by 
the Government for the use of the public in its 
pathetic campaign against a scourge which takes 
a yearly toll of 7000 of the total inhabitants 
of Norway. These stamps, which are of the 
value of 2 ore each, and marked *' The war 
against consumption," are extensively sold, 
and, it being permitted to affix them to the 
ordinary stamped letter for the post, they serve 
to keep the public ever alive to the presence of 
the dreaded '* white plague," and its obligation 
to fight it. There are also a number of open-air 
14 



2IO HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

sanatoria set aside for dealing exclusively with 
consumption. Where these have been founded 
from legats, the patients are afforded gratis treat- 
ment ; but in the State sanatorium there is an 
inclusive charge of a krone a day. 



CHAPTER XIV 

THE PEASANT AND HIS HOME 

A NORWEGIAN bonde is not a persona 
grata with the bymand. The Herr 
Grosserer will tell you that he is simply im- 
possible. If you ask him why, he will further 
tell you, with a gesture of intolerance, that he is 
devoured by the chronic maladies of envy, 
hatred, and all uncharitableness, and that he will 
never permit anyone of his own class to attain to 
a higher social level without immediately pulling 
him down to his original bearings. His own 
young men, terribly in earnest, have to a great 
extent confirmed this description of him in their 
rather gloomy rhapsodies on the bonde home life 
as they have lived it. Herr Carl Nserup sums up 
the relative position of bymand and bonde as it 
appears in the kit motif of the novels of Arne 
Garborg — himself sprung from the soil, or rather 
the sand, for he is from Jaederen — as follows : 
" There are two peoples here in this country. 
The one, consisting of a fourth part, who dwell 
in the towns — officials, grosserere, etc. — an 



212 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

exotic race, with high-sounding names of Low 
German origin, and an elegant, if overbearing, 
demeanour. This is the dominant caste, which is 
in possession of "culture" and the powers econ- 
omic. The other consists of bbnderney the primal 
inhabitants and allodial proprietors of the land, 
who speak their own old idiom of pride. And 
these latter are the cowed — the caste of the 
slave ! We see how " (in Garborg's Bonde- 
studentar — peasant students) " this foreign culture 
thrusts itself into a Vestland bonde home, and 
spreads and grows until all is devoured : farm, 
land, the future, and all life's possibilities. And 
when the work of dissolution and destruction is 
consummated the country has gained a premature, 
clumsy creature " (the peasant student), '* who can 
only muse as to how he may sell his precious 
education and his precious person to the best 
possible profit to himself. ' In a few years' time,' 
says Garborg, ' he will have entered into that 
circle of splendour and power of which he has 
always been dreaming — the highest possible 
attainable thing. Then he would with truth be 
able to say that he had, at last, reached his ideal. 
He could scarcely imagine anything more delight- 
ful than to be able to sit in an ancient parsonage 
and lord it over these bonder' " 

Thus Garborg, and, having read his novels in 



THE PEASANT AND HIS HOME 213 

the bonde vernacular and dwelled for some con- 
siderable period in the tents of his caste, I can 
endorse in some measure his earlier and more 
pessimistic views — views, by the way, which 
would seem to emphasize the Herr Grosserer's 
opinion in no little degree. But matters have 
very much improved since these written opinions 
first took the country by storm, and, as Herr 
Carl Nserup very justly opines, although the 
book in question {Bondestudentar, 1870) contri- 
buted largely to the remodelling of social 
conditions in the country, were any latter-day 
writer to depict the feud of the two cults as it at 
present exists, the result would not be on all 
fours with that arrived at by the Arne Garborg 
of 1870. 

I have known the bonde very intimately from 
his childhood upwards, and have probably had 
as many opportunities of gauging his moral 
worth as any of his young men so terribly in 
earnest ; and really, do you know, I am bound 
to say that, with all his idiosyncrasies, he is 
not at all the bad sort the Herr Grosserer would 
have me believe. But you have got to know 
him first, and to know him you must live with 
him, and, watching the Fates as they trip him 
up, note how, under the circumstances, he bears 
himself as a man. Now, the Herr Grosserer 



214 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

would not live with him for a wilderness of Fates, 
and, sooth to say, while the bonde continues to 
rule his household on the principle of "what is 
good enough for me is good enough for a king," 
his home will not offer any particular inducements 
to the Herr Grosserer to enter it ; and, mind you, 
the Herr Grosserer is not at all particular when 
it comes to straining a point. 

What the bonde may think of the Herr Grosserer 
it would be hard to say, for he never alludes to 
him in any shape or form : sitting smoking — ever- 
lastingly smoking — in his corner by the stove. 
And whatever amenities his student son may 
embody in his books, or thunder forth from his 
place in the national Storthing, they are of no 
concern whatever to the old man. But you may 
have your own good grounds for believing that 
he looks upon all bymcend pretty much as our 
own ''hayseeds" from ''way-back" regard the 
cult of London Town : that is to say, as a cult 
sempiternally carrying in its pocket the golden 
brick, the three cards, the three thimbles, and 
many another requisite of the mobsman's pro- 
fession. The bonde has been probably told by 
his father how, in the good old days, when 
timber, as an article of foreign commerce, was 
a very desirable commodity, the Herr Grosserer, 
in the guise of a merry colporteur, and accom- 



THE PEASANT AND HIS HOME 215 

panied by a crate of akvavit (the Norwegian 
potato-stilled and carraway-flavoured equivalent 
of whisky), darkened the portals of his gaard 
with his portly person, and how, after an 
unspeakable orgie, which lasted out the entire 
week, he induced that trustful old father to 
sign away his proprietary rights in his forest 
for a mere song. There are likewise other 
legends, more or less apocryphal, and therefore 
not worth mentioning, which may have led to 
the permanently vrang attitudes of these two 
irreconcilables : irreconcilable on every con- 
ceivable point, except the main one, when they 
will march shoulder to shoulder to the frontier, 
sharing the same tent, eating out of the same 
porringer, and "" skaaling " each other right 
heartily in whatever liquid may be available. 
Then, in their smart grey uniforms, and of their 
erect military deportment, you would not be able 
to tell, for nuts, which was the bonde and which 
was the Herr Grosserer. There is nothing very 
wrong with the bonde or the bymand. They 
know that much of each other, at all events ; 
and as the latter is the product of the former — 
in the first, second, or third generation — I really 
do not see what they have got to be vrang 
about. 

The bonde has had a fairly decent education 



2i6 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

at the folke skole of his bygd, or parish, and 
can at least read, write, and figure for all the 
purposes which nature, and the authorities, 
intended him. As a schoolboy he has even 
had a better time, if such were possible, than 
the schoolboy of the towns ; and his bonde 
schoolmaster, who in distant bygdes is often 
peripatetic and house to house, is as complaisant 
and kindly as the worst truant might ever desire. 
And a right merry little fellow is this bonde 
schoolboy, and a venturesome, withal. His 
ideals of chivalry are, perhaps, not on the same 
lines as those of our Board School lads, which, 
in the circumstances, is scarcely to be expected. 
There are as many ways of regarding chivalry 
from the various national view-points as were 
at the disposal of Sir John Falstaff in his 
definitions of honour. The bonde small boy 
may, for instance, when the spirit of mischief 
moves him, tease his little sister most persistently 
and mercilessly ; tease her until, finally, even 
her equable temper will give way, and she will 
rise up in her wrath and chastise him. Whereat 
he will run howling to his home, and appeal 
for immediate and condign punishment on her 
devoted head. And she catches it, there and 
then, for no mere pige-barn has any right to 
execute judgment upon the boy of the house ; 



THE PEASANT AND HIS HOME 217 

and who is there in all this wide world who 
would dream of raising a hand on her behalf? 
But she takes her punishment bravely, and 
without evincing the least sign. It is the 
metier of her sex in Norway to exhibit a stoical 
front in all periods and stages of physical pain. 
In sorrow it is quite another affair. Therefore, 
she would rather die than cry out before all 
these mand folk. Later on, however, when 
every one has forgotten the circumstance, and 
her, she will steal off into the woods, and there, 
in some pine-canopied recess, she will cry, and 
cry, until it becomes a physical impossibility for 
her to cry any more. These are traits in the 
characters of the two bonde sexes which Ibsen 
noted in Per Gynt and Solveig, and ear-marked 
unto all time. 

When the bonde lad leaves school and is con- 
firmed, he undergoes a sea change, and becomes 
less desirable. Adopting, in his new status of 
responsible manhood, the superior airs of his 
bonde elders, he assumes the same expression of 
sullen gravity, lolls about with his hands in his 
pockets — everlastingly smoking — and is, gene- 
rally speaking, decidedly, if designedly, loutish 
and unlovely. He has moreover from a very 
early age noted that the women-folk of the house- 
hold are of considerably less account than himself 



2i8 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

and his brothers — to say nothing of his father, 
and under the centripetal attraction of that grim 
old man, he gradually drifts away from the better 
influences of his mother and sisters, and leaves 
the latter henceforth and for evermore to their 
own devices. Whatever their moral worth may 
be (good temper, reticence, and chastity are the 
main considerations) they have their appointed 
place and degree of value, as any other creature 
or chattel upon the farm ; and were you ever in 
possession of the bondes inner confidences (which 
you will never be, for they are as unattainable 
as the confidences of Hindostan) he would pro- 
bably tell you that, ranking after the Almighty 
himself, the mand, the son, the horse, the kona, 
the cattle, and the daughters would fall by easy 
gradation into their allotted places in the natural 
scale of domestic appraisement. He seldom or 
never takes up a book under any circumstance 
of opportunity, confining himself to a glance at 
his father's paper when the critical comments of 
the old man would seem to call for verification, 
and his amusements are chiefly in the direction 
of open-air dancing and midnight orgies, of a 
nature, and in places, known only to himself and 
his congeners. And here, whether as a land 
bonde or a sea bonde^ he constitutes a positive 
moral danger ; for whatever faults his sisters 



THE PEASANT AND HIS HOME 219 

may possess (the worst of them is an unbounded 
admiration for his superior and ''manly" ways), 
there are few other women of their class who 
have a better claim to lament that ''the man 
tempted me and I fell " than the too-trusting and 
much-abused /^^^ of bonde Norway. Therefore 
is it encouraging to note that by enrolling women 
into the service of the police for the main purpose 
of safeguarding these too-trusting sisters during 
their visits to town, the authorities have been 
aroused to a danger no less morally destructive 
than that of the white slave traffic of other lands. 
By and by this bonde lad will marry and settle 
down on his father's farm, which, as the eldest 
son, and at the death of the old man, he has the 
option of purchasing, and he will be as faithful 
a husband as the pige of his choice will be a 
faithful wife to him. Infidelity and divorce 
among the bonder are as rare as the sight of a 
childless couple. However frisky a young girl 
may have been during the pre-marital period, 
and whatever disparity there may be in their 
ages and temperaments at marriage, the husband 
is her mand for better or for worse, and, with 
rare exceptions among a low and perverted tramp 
caste, she is faithful unto him till death doth part 
them. Incidentally she is confined to her home 
and its duties for the remainder of her natural 



2 20 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

life — if he should survive her ; but never under 
any circumstances will she flirt with, or even 
recognize an old sweetheart ; and the dancing 
green, and the rendezvous of marriageable youth 
will know her no more. These wifely obser- 
vances are imposed by bonde skik, or custom, 
which is as irrevocable as the Medean statutes 
of old-world fame. The disparity of age referred 
to is painfully in evidence at times among the 
husmand and pladsmand class, who seldom find 
it good for man to be alone. I have in mind 
a typical case of a widower who, remarrying (he 
was already grandfather to a considerable pro- 
geny) at the age of sixty with a girl of twenty- 
five, was, on his eighty-first year, grandfather to 
another brood, and father to a child of ten years 
— all of his children being, to quote an Irishism, 
'' the very spit of himself." The result, of course, 
was that he was no longer able to provide for 
the needs of three generations of hungry ones, 
and the over-burdened ''poor box" of that little 
commune sustained a shock which it has probably 
not recovered from to this day. 

As a married man and a father, the bonde 
withdraws entirely into himself. At forty-five 
he is an old man, as is his wife an old woman at 
thirty-five. Physically considered they are by 
no means venerable ; but these are the ages 



THE PEASANT AND HIS HOME 221 

when they may expect to hear irreverent youth 
refer to them as gamlen and gamla respectively. 
Next to money, youth and physical strength are 
the bonders standard of all that is humanly 
desirable. I was once told by a young bonde 
that a friend of his, a man of thirty, was about 
to marry a gammel jente, or old girl, and on 
inquiring as to her age, was told that she was 
twenty-seven ! Early marriages are the vogue 
throughout Norway and in all classes, though 
in a poor country, and the consequent uncertainty 
of income, engagements are often of long stand- 
ing — seven years being not at all an unknown 
period of waiting. The law of his land ordains 
that the bonde shall be entitled at marriage to 
one-half of his wife's fortune unless it be other- 
wise tied up, and that one-half of his worldly 
goods shall at his death go to his wife, and the 
remainder, in equal portions, to his children. 
But, as previously pointed out, the eldest son has 
the option of purchasing the farm ; and as he is 
seldom with the means to that end, he will do so 
out of the proceeds of the sale of the forests, or 
by mortgage, or both — which is a prolific cause 
of the hopeless state of debt which follows from 
generation to generation. His father may not 
during his lifetime bequeath more than a quarter 
of his personalty to others, and should his extra- 



2 22 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

vagant methods of living or his mental status 
tend to endanger the prospects of his heirs, the 
latter can, on appeal to a magistrate have him 
and his affairs placed under the control of a 
trustee, to whom he must refer on all matters of 
expenditure. If incompatibility of temperament 
should supervene in their married relations, the 
mand and his kona can (for once in a way) agree 
to lay their case before the magistrate and the 
latter having vainly endeavoured to bring about 
a reconciliation, is bound to grant them a three 
years' separation decree, during which period 
they must live apart. At the expiration of this 
interval of grace, and failing reconciliation, they 
are practically divorced, and are at liberty to 
re-marry, the children of the first marriage being 
equally distributed between them, or in the event 
of alimony being forthcoming from the father, 
the mother will take them all under her care. 
The laws relating to marriage and property, as 
indeed all laws involving civil matters, are seldom 
hard and fast, and they usually contain provisos 
granting the parties concerned the benefit of 
mutual arrangement, or arbitration, within the 
lines duly set forth for the employment of these 
moral safety-valves. 

Much may be said, in praise or depreciation 
of bonde characteristics, according to their parti- 



THE PEASANT AND HIS HOME 223 

cular form of appeal to foreign criticism. There 
can be no question as to his honesty. He will 
never "go back" on his word — indeed the law 
will not allow him — if it be given in the presence 
of a witness to the bargain, and his signed letter 
of promise requires no stamp of revenue or 
witness to his signature. In both instances the 
word or the signature is binding on either party 
in a court of law. He looks upon theft as a 
crime ranking considerably above assault with 
intent. You may leave your money, or other 
valuables, about on his tables and drawers with 
the most absolute immunity ; and as you drive 
along his high roads you will very often become 
aware of articles of lost property (sometimes of a 
most disconcerting description) hanging from 
the boughs of the trees, where he has thought- 
fully placed them for possible reclaim. He will 
never open the sealed private letter of another 
person under any circumstances whatever, and 
the postal delivery, which is often placed in an 
open box at the roadside for all and sundry to 
reject, or help themselves to, according as the 
addresses may decide, is an absolutely safe 
delivery so far as your particular letter is con- 
cerned ; but he, or any of his household, will, in 
your presence or out of it, read your postcard, 
or any other overt communication, exhaustively 



224 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

and without the least sense of wrong, for the 
simple reason that they are overt, and therefore 
common property, and you are quite at liberty 
under similar opportunities to do the same. He 
is a hard drinker, when there is any drink at 
hand ; but without the occasion he is quite satis- 
fied to remain sober. He is never a confirmed 
" boozer," and indeed the demands of his gaard, 
to say nothing of the fnagistrat, and a possible 
trustee, will not admit of it. He is loyal to a 
degree (the Herr Grosserer is not going to have 
it all to himself), though, as usual, he never says 
anything ; but you will always find the portraits 
of his king and queen hanging up to the best 
advantage in his best room, and he will tramp 
many a mile to verify that precocious little 
Prince Olaf, who has bewitched all his women 
folk, and get a handshake from a kong; whose 
heartfelt solicitude for his welfare even he with 
all his mistoenksomhed has never had a doubt. 
It is quite touching to see his old blue eyes light 
up with enthusiasm when his Huldre Dronning 
(fairy queen), as he is pleased to call the daughter 
of our English Edward, appears before him in 
his mountain fastnesses in all her queenly 
graciousness, and, of her father's spirit, takes 
him captive. 

It has been the custom to liken the bonde to 



THE PEASANT AND HIS HOME 225 

the Highlander, but I could never quite see the 
moral and physical connexion. The Scotchman 
has his ideals, and his traditions of trial and 
proof, and beyond an equal measure of piety he 
is, all round, the better man — better, that is to 
say, from the British point of view. On the 
other hand, it has never occurred to anyone 
to compare the bonde with the " colleen " 
and the " bhoy " of peasant Ireland; because 
this would be impossible. The two peoples are 
the very antithesis of each other in every quality. 
It has also been stated that a bonde will not 
work unless he is compelled by need to do so, 
but I do not think that there is any justification 
for the statement. The upkeep of his farm, 
with its inevitable mortgage, and his compulsory 
duties on the local council, leave him with very 
little spare time on his hands ; and in poor com- 
munities, with the landhandlers debit account 
and the disgrace of the fattig kassen ever before 
each individual, the ball of self-preservation must 
be constantly kept on the roll, or woe betide 
the unfit who fail in the necessary powers of 
financial propulsion. The Norwegian bonde is 
very notably a man of peace : which is a great 
virtue. When I affirm, as I may do without 
any qualms of conscience, that I have never yet 
seen him — and rarely a bymand — stand up to 
15 



226 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

another man in open fight, spirituously intact, 
and under circumstances of deadly insult, it 
should speak a good deal for his reserves of 
forbearance. And he is no coward — neither he 
nor the bymand — for they will, with or without 
a moment's notice, willingly risk their lives to 
save those of others. And their women will do 
as much. The peace instinct is inherent with 
them. Exclamations of anger, or even im- 
patience, are seldom heard among either class ; 
and cursing, together with drunkenness, like the 
ancient methods of veneer and stained glass, 
will soon be numbered among the lost arts of 
Norway. Drinking and the public spectacle 
of drunken men are far less obvious than in 
England ; and since the adoption of local option 
and the voting down of licences broadcast, the 
Norway of 191 1 is a very great improvement 
in that respect on the Norway of the '70's. 
Statistics go to prove very conclusively that 
there is always a recrudescence of inebriety 
during periods of prosperity, which is certainly 
good evidence that the increase is not due to the 
despairs of poverty and want. Drink substitutes, 
such as politur, or furniture-polish, ether, methy- 
lated spirits, and laddevin (a debased wine) still 
find their way, in spite of all restrictive measures, 
into mountain-cabin and slum ; but statistics do 



THE PEASANT AND HIS HOME 227 

not go to show (shocking as the consequences of 
this traffic must be) that insanity or gastric and 
peritoneal troubles are in proportion to the 
frightful results that might have been expected 
from the consumption of these poisons. A very 
powerful party in the country, chiefly bonder, is 
agitating for absolute prohibition by statute, 
which is equivalent to dealing with the effect 
rather than the cause. And the cause is, that 
lack of culture which knows no moral restraint. 
Were this party to educate its bonde brothers 
into a sense of reasonableness in all things — 
even akvavit — there would be very little neces- 
sity for measures of compulsion. And they 
would accomplish this more readily by example 
than by preachment, or threats. 

In all contentions affecting his personal honour 
and good name the bonde prefers in the first 
instance to leave the matter in the hands of the 
local Forligelseskommission^ or Court of Recon- 
ciliation, for adjustment, and, failing this, he will 
carry the matter on from court to court, until his 
litigious cravings have been quashed with his 
case, or satisfied by damages and costs. But 
however peaceful he may be when sober, in his 
cups he is as quarrellous as the weasel, and then 
it is not safe to have any dealings with him ; for 
the laws of his country grant him 'extenuating 



228 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

circumstances when the liquor is in, and he may 
murder, or manslaughter, or cripple you under 
comparatively trivial penalties — provided that he 
has previously gotten himself unto the necessary 
state of irresponsibility. The death penalty by 
beheading is not now carried out, and, indeed, 
the law-abiding instincts of all classes very rarely 
call for it. 

The etiquette of the bonde is as formal in its 
way, and to be observed, as that which governs 
the daily life of the Herr Grosserer. It is based 
on a preternatural gravity and the avoidance 
of all display of temperamental incontinence. 
When, as a stranger, you arrive on the high 
stone steps leading to his inner dwelling, and 
after knocking on the door without any result, 
open it, you will seldom find him prominently 
in evidence, and you will experience some diffi- 
culty in differentiating him from the other men in 
the stova, or main room ; for they are all in shirt 
sleeves, and looking as alike as peas in a pod. 
Incidentally the room is very warm (whether it 
be summer or winter), the windows and doors 
are all closed, and tobacco smoke pervades the 
place as densely as in a skipper's cabin. In the 
one - roomed house of the poorest bonde all 
cooking is performed on, or in, the stove ; and 
when the outside summer temperature is over 




o 
< 

H 
H 
O 

u 

m 
H 

< 
<! 

< 



THE PEASANT AND HIS HOME 229 

80 degrees in the shade, and the one window not 
practicable of opening, it is not always safe, or 
even possible, to enter and pass the occupants 
the time of the day. When this inside tem- 
perature, which may be anything over 100 
degrees, is maintained in contradistinction to an 
outside winter reading below zero, it may be not 
only inferred that all act of entry is positively 
dangerous, but that krim, or chronic catarrh, and 
bronchitis (to say nothing of phthisical trans- 
mission), is more evident than that robust state 
of health which the pure mountain air would, 
under other conditions, vouchsafe to the inmates. 
This tendency towards stuffiness, notwithstand- 
ing the great strides the fri-luft, or open air 
movement (after British example), has been 
making of late, is still very apparent in the 
towns, though, of course, to a much lesser ex- 
tent, and passing along the streets on a very 
hot summer day you will notice that an open 
window is rather the exception than the rule. I 
have often been roused out of midsummer night 
dreams by clamorous, if very thoughtful, land- 
ladies calling my attention to the alarming fact 
that my window was wide open, and reminding 
me that pneumonia was the least of the troubles 
to be contracted by so rash an innovation. This 
notion is really the one standing obstacle to a 



230 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

general adoption of the fri-luft principle ; though 
I have my own suspicion that the spick-and-span 
condition of the town rooms, and the fear of 
intruding dust, have a great deal to do with it. 
Anyone who has occupied a cabin on the sunny 
side of a steamer, with the Herr Grosserer as a 
companion and the open or shut condition of the 
port-hole or door a subject of contention, will 
be, doubtless, in a position to throw some further 
light on this very important subject of proper 
ventilation. 

Returning to the stova, the new hand will 
ask the kona if han (he) or the mand sj'olv 
(the man himself) is in ? To mention his name 
in full would not be strict bonde etiquette ; nor 
would it expedite matters, for he has probably 
acquired three or four place-names if he have 
moved from one parish to another ; though it will 
always be safe to refer to him by his Christian 
names of Anders, Knut, Sweyn, or Ola. But 
you need not allude to him or his caste in his 
immediate presence as bonde and bonder. He will 
prefer the emollients landsmand and landsmcend. 
Likewise, in writing to him, you will do well 
to address him as Herr Gaardbruger, Anders 
Underbjerg. Of course the Herr Grosserer does 
not like this, and insists on its being nothing more 
than vulgar ostentation ; but really, and as between 



THE PEASANT AND HIS HOME 231 

ourselves, the Herr Gaardbruger does not care 
one snap of his horny thumb for the Herr Grosserer 
and all his *' cultured "y^/Z^^/'^^i^r, or fal-lals. 

The mand sjolv will not come forward to receive 
you, but, pipe in mouth, from his reclining 
position on the bed, or from the stove side, 
he will listen gravely to all your genial incon- 
tinences, and, at their close, will simply remark 
'' god dag'' You note your breach of etiquette, 
and returning him the special '' good day " due to 
him as master of the house, you revert somewhat 
crestfallen to the purpose of your visit, which is 
usually food : thereby exhibiting your further 
ignorance of bonde good form ; because the kona, 
having heard your requirements in the first 
instance, has gone out into the kitchen to prepare 
for them as a matter of course. An old hand 
would have noted that, and avoided any second 
reference to the subject. The mand sjolv remarks, 
indifferently, that there " might be some raad for 
del'' (means to that end), and proceeds to inflict 
upon you a very minute process of personal 
inspection. A bonde will never, under any 
circumstances, vouchsafe a direct answer either 
in the affirmative or the negative ; and, '* would," 
''could," ''should," "might" and "ought" in all 
their exasperating conditionals and future poten- 
tials are as the very breath of life to him. This 



232 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

is also a point of bonde etiquette, and is generally 
termed bonde forsigtighed, or peasant caution. 
The Herr Grosserer, however, calls it bonde 
mistcBnksomhed (peasant suspiciousness, or even 
cussedness), forgetting that his own Frue when 
ordering a pound of steak at the butcher's will 
invariably say '' det skulde vcere,'' or, ''it should 
be " a pound of steak. 

You will now begin to feel decidedly uncom- 
fortable at this apparent lack of hospitality, but 
being desperately hungry, not to say faint, you 
glance around the room for something whereon 
to seat yourself; and, as no one makes a sign, 
you sink into a chair in the middle of the floor. 
An old hand would have done so at once on 
coming in. The man himself, without removing 
his pipe (they have all got their hats on), will 
then ask you where that man (meaning your- 
self) is from. You tell him where you are from. 
He remarks ''jasaa /" (indeed), but without any 
visible expression of surprise : among people 
inquisitive to a painful degree, and who are 
perfectly cognisant of each other's most intimate 
affairs, he probably knows all about you already. 
He then asks you what that man's name is, what 
his age is, what his condition, or lack of condi- 
tion, is as regards a wife, what his native country 
is, his means of livelihood, and what his possible 



THE PEASANT AND HIS HOME 233 

views are as to his terrestrial future — he never 
troubles you about your religious denomination. 
You satisfy him on all these points to the best of 
your knowledge and ability, and under the almost 
palpable scrutiny of the other men, sitting about 
on beds, benches and stools, and everlastingly 
smoking. The women don't notice you at all — 
while there are any men about. And you must 
not notice them — while there are any men about. 
With the appearance of the kona and the 
daughter, with the longed-for food, your spirits 
begin to rise, and you seek to establish a 
better social atmosphere in the reeking room 
by addressing yourself to them in what you 
are pleased to consider an engaging manner. 
You could not have committed a greater mistake, 
a greater breach of bonde etiquette — as their 
half-scared looks and muttered acknowledgments 
bear out. You must never address yourself in 
a general way to the women while there are 
men in the room, especially in the presence of 
the man himself. If you are alone in the 
company of women you may talk to them as 
much as you like, and they will not be slow in 
talking back, and to your heart's content, for 
they are only too eager to hear the outside 
news — not overtly asking you, bear in mind, 
but casually, if insidiously drawing you, after the 



234 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

methods of their sex. But it is a strong point of 
bonde pige etiquette never to repeat, never to 
tell ; and if, as a kona, she should prove less 
reticent, it will not matter so much, for that 
virtue is of less value to her in the married 
estate. An old hand would not have made your 
mistake, nor will he commit the faux pas of 
openly acknowledging an acquaintanceship, how- 
ever slight, however intimate, with any young 
woman in the room. Bonde etiquette has 
appointed a time for all such follies, and if you 
are a bondegut, and on courting bent, you will 
know that Saturday evening is the proper time 
appointed to call upon your jente. So you will 
please to bear in mind that however attractive 
the company of the women may be, and however 
flattering the knowledge may be that they will 
never give you away (if their men invariably 
will), you must transfer your conversation to the 
man himself, or any other man, as soon as he 
enters the room. A dreadful infliction this, as, 
beyond the topics of *' wind and weather," as the 
women contemptuously term it, and your own 
personal peculiarities, the mand sjolv has abso- 
lutely no conversation at all. In the deadly 
impasse of intellect which such a disability is 
likely to set up, a person of ordinary intelli- 
gence feels impelled, at times, to shampoo his 



THE PEASANT AND HIS HOME 235 

head, or shriek aloud, as a last desperate pre- 
caution against certain and sudden dementia. 

Your refection, which will almost invariably 
consist of coffee, waffle cakes, flat bread, cheese, 
and perhaps a tin of sardines from the landhand- 
leriet, having been placed on a clean cloth on the 
massive general table, you draw up your chair 
and fall to with what zest you may under the 
eyes of the smoking and regardant crowd. The 
women stand by ready to fill up your cup on 
the instant of your emptying it ; and the best 
possible return you can make to them for their 
kindly and persistent entreaties that you shall 
go on eating, is to do so, and eat and drink 
as much as you conveniently can. As a rule, 
the women will not participate in the ordi- 
nary meals of the day if a guest be present. 
They either take their places at the table 
when the men have finished, or retire to the 
kitchen with the crockery-ware, and have their 
meals there. 

When, as a newcomer, you have broken your 
fast, and lit your pipe (it is not considered strict 
etiquette to apply for permission to do so), it will 
have gradually dawned on your mind that the 
apparent rudeness of your reception was really 
nothing more than a cloak for a natural shyness of 
disposition; which was, perhaps, as inevitable in its 



236 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

way as the nervous man's habit of touching his 
nose, or the lobe of his ear, when passing an ob- 
servant crowd, or the tobacco maniac s pecuHarity, 
when taken conversationally unawares, of hurry- 
ing his pipe into his mouth in order to regain his 
lip control and self-confidence. Little by little you 
become conscious that your visit, far from being 
resented, is looked upon rather as an event of a 
pleasurable kind. Whatever shortcomings there 
might have been apparent were entirely due to 
your ignorance of bonde etiquette. The women 
will come in with their knitting and sit away in 
corners listening with veiled avidity to your rather 
florid recital of the wonderful ''carryings on" 
of the great outside world ; and you cannot 
sufficiently satisfy the men as to what that great 
world thinks about Noreg, their country — and 
themselves. If you are a close observer, you 
will notice that socially equal as they all abso- 
lutely are, and with all their affectation of placing 
you on the same level, there is nevertheless an 
air of deference in their manner of addressing 
you, which they have probably inherited from 
their forefathers, who extended the same respect 
to skjalds, or bards, when they also came to them 
from foreign lands — and improvised. If you 
remain for the night the gjoeste vcerelse, or guests' 
room (the best room in the house), will be allotted 



THE PEASANT AND HIS HOME 237 

to you, and despite your protests, your meals, which 
are several grades better than their own, will be 
served to you separately, and on a cloth — which 
they never use except on very high occasions. 
And if you have succeeded in completely 
gaining his heart, the mand sjolv will, before you 
retire, and when the others have gone, beckon you 
into an adjoining room, draw down the blinds, 
lock the door, and, with an assumption of not 
quite remembering where they were, produce a 
bottle of akvavit and some glasses from a cup- 
board, and half-a-dozen bottles of beer from the 
cellar. There was really not the slightest 
occasion for all this melodramatic procedure ; 
but the bonde is nothing if not secretive. Then, if 
ever the '' skaal " system in all its original Viking 
terrors were any matter of doubt, it will not be 
so now. But the etiquette of the bonde is 
different. It does not square with that of the 
Herr Grosserer. The " skaal " of the latter was 
single-barrelled, so to speak ; but that of the 
former is double-barrelled, and far more destruc- 
tive in operation. The man himself fills a couple 
of diminutive wine-glasses with akvavit — for the 
sweetness, if not the cash value, of the liquor 
must be long drawn out — and likewise a couple 
of tumblers with beer. This done, he says, 
'' ja-ja, skaaly da'' and, without further parley, 



238 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

tosses off the akvavit, and immediately drinks 
down the beer on the top of it ; and you, with 
some memories of your first castor-oil, and sub- 
sequent cup of tea, do the same. On ordinary 
occasions of bonde good-fellowship the ceremonial 
is continued until the bottles are all empty, and 
the man himself and his friend decidedly full ; 
but he is well aware of the Britisher's unaccount- 
able prejudices against the alternative system, 
and will not press you unduly. He is not always 
very nice in the choice of the two drinks and 
their assimilative properties, and may possibly 
offer you port wine and stout. But here you 
will, as I have done, find some very cogent 
reasons for declining. 

On the following morning, having thanked the 
household by shaking hands with every member 
of it, and — if you are in the more northern dis- 
tricts — vainly endeavoured to make them accept 
cash payment, you will go away with a fortified 
sense of the goodness which may prevail in the 
most humble surroundings. I have here stated 
the case as you will find it in the average bonde 
home, and in the ninety-nine you will stumble 
upon for every one of the stor bonde, or big bonde 
of means — or the home of the returned Norsk- 
American bonde, and the many show guards, and 
posting stations along the beaten routes. There 



THE PEASANT AISID HIS HOME 239 

are bondes and bondes, as there are bonde homes 
and bonde homes, but within the latter the same 
skiks prevail in a greater or lesser degree, and 
the big bonde of prosperous Osterdalen, Tele- 
marken and Gudbrandsdalen has the same in- 
eradicable idiosyncrasies as his poorer brother of 
the water-soaked little western crevices. Some of 
these old skiks are as strange as they are quite 
unaccountable. I once sat down to table in a 
Bamble gaard, whereat a plate of melke grod (a 
porridge of boiled milk and flour, eaten with 
castored sugar, cinnamon, and milk) was the 
staple dish. As I was rather hungry, and the 
grod appetising, I incontinently asked for more — 
which was given me. The other guests appeared 
to have been more than satisfied with their first 
help, for I noticed that there was a small portion 
of the porridge left on each plate. I was after- 
wards informed that I had broken the Bamble 
skik, which ordains that you must not quite 
finish up the contents of your plate. This skik 
may have taken its rise from the fact that a 
second helping among a numerous company of 
diners would constitute a serious drain on the 
resources of a poor family. Now the fact that 
they had broken my skik, by seating me one of 
thirteen at that table was equally strange to them, 
and it left them quite unmoved when I explained it 



240 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

to them in all its heinousness. In another western 
and very primitive valley the inhabitants walk 
into one another's houses with their hats on, and 
without salutation of any kind, and then — even 
as dogs — walk out again without wishing the 
inmates god dag, farvel, or adjo, or anything 
else. Two of these valley men meeting on a 
lonely mountain road will engage in conversation 
without any preliminary references to the day, and 
after some interval of gossip one of them will 
drift off, without excuse or any approach to a 
leave-taking. No disrespect is intended. They 
would comport themselves in the same way 
towards the Herr Grosserer did he come among 
them — which he will take precious good care not 
to do — for they know of no social degrees, and 
are simply what their Viking progenitors left 
them. Truly may it be said that the Norwegian 
bonder are of the most democratic class of people 
on earth. Nothing forms so permanent and 
interesting a topic of dinner-table conversation 
in the towns as these bonde skiks, and the 
peculiarities of the dialects. The latter are as 
numerous as there are valleys throughout the 
country, and are all founded on the ancient 
Norrona maal (language), the primeval idiom of 
Scandinavia. 

The dietary of the bonde is frequent of indul- 



THE PEASANT AND HIS HOME 241 

gence, and more or less monotonous of kind. If 
we take a typical gaard in a more prosperous 
parish in Central Norway we will find that the 
meal hours and their courses are approximately 
as follows : — 

Fastanbaattaa (from 6 a.m. to 6.30 a.m.) — 

Coffee, smorrebrod, or syrup instead of 
butter. 

Aabit (from 7.30 a.m. to 8.30 a.m.) — 

Whey soup, water-gruel, a little dry 
smoked meat, or sausage, lobscouse, fish, 
or bacon ; coffee. 

Dugur (from 11 to 12 noon) — 

Barley-meal porridge and milk. (An 
hour's lur^ or siesta.) 

Middags Kaffe (from 12 to i p.m., after the 
siesta) — 

Coffee and smorrebrod. 

Non (from 3.30 p.m. to 4 p.m.) — 

The same food as for Aabit, with 
coffee. 

Kvelsmad (at 8 p.m.) — 

Porridge and milk, and to bed at 10 o'clock 
or a little later. 

Coffee, it will be noticed, is a feature with 
every meal ; and oatmeal porridge the excep- 
16 



242 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

tion. Coffee is resorted to not only at the 
hours stated, but throughout the day, whenever 
the spirit moves any one to visit the ever-ready 
kettle. In this typical valley of 2923 inhabitants 
the annual consumption of coffee amounts to 
about 29,000 lbs. — without including the coffee 
bought outside the district. Say a little under 
10 lbs. per head per man, woman, and child. 
Nevertheless, insomnia does not trouble the 
bonde, nor is he otherwise neurotic — in so far 
as the men are concerned. 

The Norwegian bonde, then, to sum him up, 
is a big, rough, uncultured child of Nature, with 
a number of natural good qualities outweighing 
the few bad ones which this lack of culture has 
solely engendered. He has a particularly hard 
time of it wresting his scanty living from his 
stony or water-logged pastures, and his life, such 
as it is, is one dull, sordid existence of toil and 
brood, with no apparent opportunity of redeem- 
ing its hopelessness, and no gleam of comfort 
to hearten him in the struggle other than his 
unswerving religious faith, which he clings to 
most tenaciously in the face of all the newer 
and more disturbing tenets. Beyond that, there 
is nothing to improve him — cultured books he 
will have none of — no one to lead him, no local 
examples of chivalry and manhood as they are 



THE PEASANT AND HIS HOME 243 

understood in their noblest sense, to lift him 
above the petty envies and narrow-minded views 
of his caste. But the germ is there, deep down 
in that chilled old heart, as anyone may have noted 
who, having gained some measure of his con- 
fidence, and essaying to probe these depths by a 
word or two of sympathy and encouragement, 
has seen him lay his great crop head down into 
the voluminous sleeves of his shirt, to conceal his 
weakness. Had I the framing of his laws, I 
would enact that the conditions of primogeniture 
should contain a clause whereby he be made 
to produce a certificate of ordinary humane 
culture before he seats himself in the koiscede 
(seat of honour) of his (di^tr's gaard. It would 
be better for him, for his children, and above 
all for his women, who are as far removed from 
him in every self-sacrificing and noble quality 
as the bymand is centuries apart from him in all 
things. That there is a better, if not a good, 
time coming I am personally fully convinced ; 
for with the emancipation of his country in 1905 
a new spirit appears to have entered the frost- 
bound old heart ; and I have really almost come 
to the conclusion that he is about to seize the 
opportunity and rise to the level of the occasion. 
His sons are more eager to enter the schools 
of agriculture, and are forming themselves into 



244 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

associations that will keep them away from the 
seductions of itinerant and lawless akvavii 
hawkers, the too frequent open-air dance, and 
that general tendency to moral drift which 
marked him in the hooligan days of his youth. 
He, the mand sjolv, is likewise in greater 
evidence in the national Storthing, and if he 
could only devote a little study to the works 
of Spencer, and Mill, and learn that political 
and social economy were age-worn sciences 
while his forbears as yet went in skins, he 
would hold his own against the wiliest states- 
man that ever breathed. The stress of hard 
times has sent a number of his brothers to the 
coast, to take up better lands adjoining the 
towns. These brothers, in the second or third 
generation, being neither bymoend in one sense 
nor bonder in another, are a colony to them- 
selves, and proximate, if in a far smaller social 
and economic degree, to the British middle class 
and lower middle class. Without being unduly 
influenced by the town, beyond the necessary 
leaven of culture so long needed, and pre- 
serving that natural if less rugged inde- 
pendence of manner, and the sound physique 
bred of fjeld and fjord, they are a happy 
example of what might obtain were it pos- 
sible to deal similarly with the far-away and 



THE PEASANT AND HIS HOME 245 

hopeless communities of the crevices. And 
these farms, which are within easy distance, 
by horse or steamboat, of the towns on the 
coast, may with justice be termed better-class 
farms. 



CHAPTER XV 

A DAY ON A BETTER-CLASS FARM 

A SLIGHT rustling sound is conveyed to 
the subconscious mind — it might have 
been a mouse had I not known, sub- 
consciously, that mice had no habitation with 
us — and I open my eyes to a mellow light 
in the far corner of the bedroom. 

A face is illumined by it, and stands out 
bodiless and in soft relief against the surround- 
ing darkness ; the face of a young girl of some 
sixteen Norwegian winters, pretty and plump of 
contour, plaintive and sad in its sphinx-like 
repose, and encircled by a fluffy halo of straw- 
coloured hair. 

She has just torn and lighted some strips of 
birch bark from the wood supply in the corner 
basket, and, kneeling by the stove, feeds the 
flame with splinters of resinous pine, or tyri. 
There is a complete absence of clatter in the 
subsequent piling of the birch faggots upon the 
blazing bark, the closing of the stove door, and 

the nice adjustment of its air-regulator. How 

247 



248 HOME LIP^E IN NORWAY 

absolutely noiseless are these women -folk in 
their household avocations ! There are some 
five or six pairs of wooden shoes of assorted 
sizes under the porch outside, but they are never 
brought into the house to disturb the peace. 
They are assumed, and kicked off, when it is 
necessary to go out, or in, but otherwise they 
lie there in their serried array from year's end 
to year's end, like the discarded footwear of 
pilgrims praying within. The little sphinx by 
the stove has probably come in shoeless, or in 
list slippers, and you may never hear the sound 
of her footfalls throughout the long day's run 
of her domestic duties. 

She remains for some minutes crouched by 
the side of the stove, peering at times into its 
depths, or listening for indications of failing 
combustion ; but her face has the same sad 
expression it ever bears when the thoughts are 
self-centred and non-speculative. She opens the 
door for a final inspection, nods approvingly at 
the satisfactory progress of affairs within, lays 
the match-box on the projecting iron shelf and 
is about to rise when I whisper : 

''G'mor'n, Magnhild." 

In an instant the mask-like features have 
flashed into vivid life. There is a gleam of 
strong regular teeth, dimples form in the smooth 



DAY ON A BETTER-CLASS FARM 249 

pale cheeks, and the large blue eyes sparkle 
with animation and subdued mischief as she 
whispers back : 

" G'mor'n. Jeg gratulere Dem med dagen'' 
(Good morning. I congratulate you on the day). 

" Hey ? What is that— the day ? " 

'' Your birthday. G'mor'n." 

The face is withdrawn into the ofloom. A 
door closes softly. She has gone. 

My birthday ! Why so it is. I had positively 
forgotten all about it ; and — what is this } I must 
be getting terribly aged, not to say decrepit ; 
for as I turn to the wall I am conscious of pain 
in every muscle and joint in my body. My very 
fingers seem to be rigid and are certainly aching ; 
and as I pass my hands apprehensively over my 
face I am made aware that there are weals — it 
might be even blebs — upon the smarting palms. 

I remember it all now. I have been digging 
potatoes for the last fortnight from eight o'clock 
in the morning until six in the evening, and no 
one can dig potatoes for half a day without the 
conviction that backs and palms were never 
designed by Nature for that pursuit. 

I strike a match and glance at my watch 
hanging by a nail on the wall. It is half-past 
six — and therefore — time for — another snooze — 

The subconscious one is aroused to cosy 



2 50 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

warmth by a fairy touch on the bedclothes, a 
slight (and intentional) jar of crockery, and the 
unmistakable aroma of fresh-made coffee — with- 
out the chicory. I am alone. The blinds have 
been noiselessly raised, and the glorious light of 
a September morning's sun is flooding the little 
room. 

Rising on my elbow I survey the contents 
of a napkinned tray on the table by the bedside. 
A porcelain coffee pot, large enough for a small 
family, a cup and saucer, sugar bowl, and cream 
jug to match — the latter filled with delicious 
fresh cream — a glass dish with butter made last 
evening, and a plate of white bread and Kavring 
(rusks). Likewise a picture postcard — evidently 
posted the day before yesterday, and surrep- 
titiously withheld from me for this festive 
occasion. It treats of a young lady in a purple 
and spangled costume (presumably an angel) 
with the wings of a condor, and presenting a 
blue cornucopia filled to overflowing with silver 
and golden coin. On the reverse side of the 
card is my name and address, with hearty con- 
gratulations in respect of the day, and it is 
signed, like an affectionate petition, by *' Pappa," 
'♦ Mamma," '* Thorvald," ** Magnhild," and an 
obviously assisted signature which I make out 
to be that of the spoilt one of the house, little 



DAY ON A BETTER-CLASS FARM 251 

Petronilla. On the large round table in the 
centre of the room there are other things which 
were certainly not there the night before ; a 
tobacco jar in the guise of a miniature hogshead 
of wine, a paper knife with a carved handle, a 
briar-root pipe with amber mouthpiece, and a 
tiny embroidered pouch wherein to bestow my 
watch at night. 

It is overwhelming ! and I lie back on the 
pillow with closed eyes, wondering whether the 
emotions of the great one on whom the freedom 
of a city has been conferred in a golden casket 
and illuminated address could largely exceed 
mine at this yearly assurance of the freedom of 
the home. 

With this and kindred pleasing reflections I 
am about to doze off again when I am aroused 
by the lowing of cattle close under the windows 
and the shrill cry of the husmancCs son calling 
them to the hills, and — ah ! the coffee. 

Of all the foreign customs I have pined for 
in tea-drinking Britain, and didn't find, this cup 
of ** home-made" coffee in bed is the most 
delightful. The English beverage in itself 
cannot compare with it. I have often asked 
the travelled Scandinavian why this should be 
so, and he has as often replied " For two reasons. 
First, you blend chicory with your coffee ; and, 



252 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

secondly, you grind your coffee too finely. The 
result is that you drink a quantity of grounds in 
suspension, and your ' coffee ' is not coffee so 
much as chicory." A Norwegian peasant of the 
better class buys a high-grade coffee in the bean, 
unroasted. It is then roasted by instalments, 
and at night, in the stove or any fireplace, in 
a long-handled iron container, and the contents 
are emptied away from the dwelling rooms. 
Thus all unpleasant smoke and smell is avoided. 
The coffee is then ground, not too finely, and 
immediately before use. The coffee kettle is 
half filled with fresh cold water, in order that 
it may not afterwards boil over, and sufficient 
coffee for the requirements is put in. When the 
water comes to the boil it is kept boiling for four 
minutes. The kettle is then placed on one side 
of the hot range and the grounds allowed to settle. 
This is hastened and perfected by the addition 
of a tiny piece of dry, salted fish skin, and in a 
few minutes the coffee is ready for pouring — 
hot, clear, and brown as a berry, and as delicious 
as only Norwegian coffee may be. You didn't 
know about that tiny piece of dry, salted fish 
skin, did you, oh, my tourist, when you drank 
and be-praised your Norwegian coffee ? Should 
that process be now objectionable an added lump 
of sugar will answer the purpose almost as well. 



DAY ON A BETTER-CLASS FARM 253 

What havoc to be sure the association of ideas 
may sometimes effect ! I remember a Norwegian 
State chemist telling an alarmed and indignant 
public through the columns of a newspaper that 
if they had never known that the three drowned, 
and unrecoverable, human bodies in the town 
reservoir were there the water would to all intents 
and purposes have been jus^ the same. 

Among the poorer peasantry the coffee grounds 
are not removed after the first brew, but are 
added to continuously for two or three days before 
the final residue is thrown out. This, of course, 
is not to be commended ; but where means are 
prescribed, the household large, and coffee in 
constant demand throughout the day, a series of 
fresh brews would be simply ruinous. Now on 
the tea question the English housewife has the 
undoubted advantage over the Scandinavian 
husmor. 

I have been often asked by the untravelled 
Norwegian why this should be so, and I have as 
often replied, ** Because, as a rule, you use well- 
water. Then you pour your boiling water into a 
cold teapot from a kettle which has been a'boil 
more or less all day. Incidentally your teacups 
are ever cold, and you allow too long an interval 
for the tea to draw." I considered this informa- 
tion sufficient for the day, and said nothing to 



254 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

him about the unnecessary Httle wire nose-bag 
which he hangs on the spout of his tea-pot under 
the mistaken conviction that the swallowing 
of a tea-leaf will produce grave consequences. 
Nevertheless, the consumption of tea is, notwith- 
standing a crushing duty, increasing by leaps 
and bounds. Curiously enough the Norwegian, 
contrary to English notions on the subject, 
usually puts milk into his tea and cream into his 
coffee. The peasant, for some unexplained 
reason, apart from his unbounded hospitality, 
has a quaint habit of filling your cup, and some- 
times the saucer, to overflowing, thus leaving no 
vacancy whatever for the cream until you have 
drunk a portion of the cafd noir, Cafd au lait 
by the way, is practically unknown throughout 
the land. The old peasant custom of holding 
the sugar or sugar-candy between the teeth 
when drinking is slowly, and happily, dying out. 

With somewhat of the foregoing notes and 
reflections in mind I have finished my kaffe og 
kavringy washed, dressed, made my bed, and 
tidied up the room. 

Needless to say the last two tasks had fallen 
like bolts from the blue on the unsuspecting heads 
of the devoted household. No mandfolk (man) 
throughout the length and breadth of Norway, 
unless he were an enebo, or hermit, had ever been 



DAY ON A BETTER-CLASS FARM 255 

known to do such a thing under any circum- 
stances whatever. The little sphinx had been 
indescribably shocked. Mamma had thrown up 
her hands in amazed protest ; and even stolid 
Pappa had eyed me furtively, and with apprehen- 
sion, as who should say, '' Young man, I should 
dearly like to pass my hands over your phren- 
ological bumps." But I had stood my ground, 
as I have always done on similar occasions. I 
pointed out that it was a special patent of my 
own finding, designed to remove sleep from the 
eyes and to promote mental and physical 
activities for the earlier business of the day. I 
assured them, moreover, that it was an unquali- 
fied pleasure, and that to allow my patent to 
lapse now would be equivalent to foregoing my 
matutinal kaffe for ever. This saved me. I 
had been careful not to suggest that the work 
lessened the burden of their household duties. 
To have done so would have been fatal — besides 
it would not have been in accordance with the 
fact. Yet there was something in the eye of the 
sphinx that was not far removed from the gravest 
suspicion, and I am positively certain, though I 
had no actual proofs, that notwithstanding my 
adeptness the bed was always remade and the 
room always re-ordered before I retired for the 
night. Emboldened by my triumph I had in a 



256 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

moment of rashness started out the next morning- 
with a bucket for the purpose of filling my bath 
from the well. But here the ever-prescient one 
had anticipated me, and from an ambush behind 
the cow-house had darted out and taken the 
bucket from me. No, no, no ! It would have 
to stop at that — the limit. It might be the 
custom in my country ; but 7ny country wasn't 
the only country in this world, Gud ske lov ! (God 
be praised), and apart from that she wasn't going 
to have it. 

She had put her foot down, unmistakably and 
uncompromisingly ; and when a Norway maid 
puts her foot down nothing — not even a mouse — 
will induce her to shift it. I retired to my rooms, 
bucketless and crestfallen. 

A pair of folding doors give into my dagligstue, 
or everyday room, and here I find the same 
comfortable and even temperature which is 
maintained in every up-to-date Norwegian house 
from late autumn until early spring. The stove 
is crackling merrily away in its corner, and there 
is a faint smell of konger'dgelse, or incense, which 
the thoughtful sphinx has dropped upon its 
heated surface. This room, like the bedroom, 
and indeed all the rooms in the house, is 
panelled with varnished matchboarding, the 
ceilings white, with a pretty stencilled border 



DAY ON A BETTER CLASS FARM 257 

and centrepiece. The painted floors are abso- 
lutely draught-proof and practically devoid of 
carpets, short lengths of blue-and-white hand- 
woven matting taking their place. There are 
three windows to each of these two rooms, and 
all of them are fitted with green hoUand blinds 
and draped with lace curtains. There is a 
feeling induced by the low-silled windows which 
I have never been quite able to overcome after 
the breast-high bays of London town — a feeling 
as though one were always on the point of falling 
out of the house. 

A large centre table, a ditto basket chair, a 
rocking-chair, six cane-bottom ditto, a corner 
cupboard, a piano, one large and rather ornate 
hanging lamp, a miscellaneous collection of 
flowers in bloom on the window-sills, a ditto, 
ditto of books (in, or out of, bloom) in a pitch 
pine bookcase, a gun, a fishing-rod, a collection 
of stuffed birds and a squirrel on corner brackets, 
and a few emotional subjects in oleograph on the 
walls, and there you have an inventory of effects 
which, God He willing, may never be disturbed 
in the lifetime of their present owner by auc- 
tioneer or bailiff's man. 

I pass through the hall and out into the porch. 
A flapping sound overhead attracts my attention 
to the Norwegian flag on its staff in the apple 
17 



258 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

orchard, significantly waving in honour of a very 
insignificant occasion. Pappa, a portly gentleman 
with grizzled hair and beard and the spacious air 
of a Florentine noble (in his shirt-sleeves), is in 
the act of belaying the cords, and pauses to 
remove his hat and gratulere me med dagen. 
Simultaneously Mamma, Thorvald, and little 
Petronilla appear, as it were out of the earth, 
and repeat the formula, taking me by the hand. 
I make a little speech, as in duty bound, but it is 
of so confused and indeterminate a character that 
even little Petronilla is constrained to laugh ; and 
so the ordeal is at an end. 

The seven small hornless cows have been 
already duly milked, and the content, in a huge 
can, is about to be driven into the town to the 
meieri, or public dairy, by Thorvald the first- 
born and heir. Magnhild, from the porch beside 
me, beckons to '' Fram," an obese little cob of 
the usual drab-coloured Graeco- Roman type, with 
hogged mane, flowing tail, and zebra-striped 
legs, and it comes up to the door, cart and all, 
and takes the slice of bread and lump of sugar 
gingerly from her hand — nuzzling at her pockets 
for more. 

Then Thorvald, the living replica of Pappa, 
without the grizzled hair and beard and the 
spacious air, climbs into the cart and drives off. 



DAY ON A BETTEK-CLASS FARM 259 

His vehicle will be loaded up with similar cans, 
all filled with fresh milk, before he reaches town ; 
for the neighbouring farmers have, by pre- 
arrangement, carried their supply to the roadside, 
where it is picked up by him on the way, and the 
empty cans are dropped at the appointed places 
on the return journey. To-morrow it will be 
somebody else's turn to do the rounds, ' and 
Mamma and the sphinx will carry the can out 
to the high road at a very early hour in the 
morning ; and later on one of us will fetch back 
the empty can whenever the spirit moves us so 
to do. 

Approaching winter has already breathed upon 
us for the first time last night, and the surround- 
ings are white with the frost that heralds the 
final rains. In front of me, across the yard, is 
the auxiliary dwelling, or bryggekus, into which 
the family move when the spring ploughing 
begins, leaving the main dwelling, or vaanings- 
hus, throughout the summer months to silence — 
and to me. This custom, which is pretty general 
throughout the country districts, has never quite 
appealed to my sense of the fitness of things. 
That the family should desert a roomy and com- 
fortable home on the very threshold of summer 
for a, comparatively speaking, crowded and 
stuffy bryggekus, in order that the former may 



26o HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

not be desecrated by the soil and toil of the 
fields, has always struck me as being inadequate 
as an excuse, and I have ever shown my dis- 
approval (both I and the cat) by clinging to the 
vaaningshus to the very last, the family good- 
naturedly assenting. When appealed to on the 
common-sense aspect of this custom, the sphinx, 
with that provokingly superior air of kindly con- 
descension which transforms her for the time 
into an elderly matron of affairs indulging a 
spoilt child, has informed me that they looked 
upon summer as their hardest and most continu- 
ous working period, and that it didn't therefore 
much matter to them where they lived as long as 
they had the vaaningshus so bright and clean 
and cosy to flytte back into for the long winter 
holiday. They had moved in only yesterday, 
because the last of the potatoes will have 
been housed to-day, and it — well, it was my 
birthday. 

On my right, forming half the irregular square 
of the tun, or farmyard, are the cowhouse, and 
the hay, corn, and straw stores : a sloping bridge 
leading to the upper floor, from whence the hay 
and straw are thrown ; and on this floor are 
also a space for chaff-cutting and threshing opera- 
tions, and a special apartment into which the 
poultry retire with the first fall of the snows. 



DAY ON A BETTER-CLASS FARM 261 

Beneath, the seven hornless ones are comfortably 
housed throughout the winter ; and '* Fram," the 
obese, and '' Petter," the still more corpulent pig, 
have separate accommodations that leave nothing 
to be desired. A deep well, whose waters are 
never frozen in the coldest of winters, flanks the 
forage shed, and a small stabur, or store, for the 
household provisions, stands alone between the 
bryggehus and the former. 

Immediately behind the bryggehus, in a semi- 
circular sweep to the right and left, is a forest of 
spruce and silver birch, which continues with 
more or less undulation until it is brought up in 
the far distance by a precipitous range of igneous 
rock ; and behind the vaaningshus, where I am 
standing, are the tilled and pasture lands of the 
farm, a pretty park-like terrene with clumps of 
** weeping birch " and queer property-looking out- 
crops of rock — the whole sloping down towards 
the south, for the distance of a quarter of a mile, 
to the cliffs of a tideless fjord. 

Pappa, the weather-wise, glances up at the 
vane on the flagstaff, shoulders his hoe, and 
marches off to the potato patch without further 
word or sign. But I know what the old gentle- 
man's thoughts are about — ay, as well as though 
he were shouting them from the housetop. They 
are especially connected with myself and this 



262 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

maddest of all lunatical actions that have marked 
me very England. That a man hailing from 
that asylum for beneficent cranks should under- 
take to plough, reap, mow, fell trees, and set and 
dig potatoes as a pastime, and for the mere 
exercise of his body, might be imaginable when 
considered in connexion with the aberration of 
the cold bath in winter; but that he should do 
these things without payment — absolutely gratis 
and for nothing : paying, moreover, for his own 
bed and board ! Ye Gods, this was unthinkable ! 
it was worse ; it was action without any reason- 
able motive, and therefore lunatic. That settled 
it, so far as I was personally concerned ; I could 
see it in his eye, and that of the collective house- 
hold. Certainly Pappa had known of cases up 
country where men had worked for nothing — the 
women-folk at home, who slaved the year round 
for sheer food and clothing, were not of the cate- 
gory — but these men had done this thing for a 
sick and helpless neighbour whose produce had to 
be garnered (and who would do the same for 
them should occasion arise), and the motive and 
action were therefore Christian-like and neigh- 
bourly, and in some measure to be understood. 

But here again I could plainly see that Pappa 
(apart from his hypothesis of insanity) had given 
me up as a sort of mentally defective conundrum; 



DAY ON A BETTERCLASS FARM 263 

for his practical and matter-of-fact eyes of the 
lightest blue would revert to mine at times with 
an expression of the most melancholy commisera- 
tion, the rest of the household, including little 
Petronilla, obviously concurring. 

Now this potato patch lay amidst the most 
ideal surroundings imaginable. It was a patch 
by itself, on a hillside, with a southerly aspect, 
hedged in by rock and juniper, and shut away 
from the outside world by an encircling grove of 
towering pine. There were still some fifty yards, 
or more, of ten rows to complete before the field 
work for that year would be done. Certainly 
there were the turnips still to be gotten in, but 
there was no immediate hurry about them. A 
little premature frost or rain would not hurt them 
so much as it would the potatoes — as anyone 
must know who has had the misfortune to hoe 
them out of a frost-bound bed, or differentiate 
them from stones in a sea of mud. The turnips 
could wait — and the cows for them. Our task 
had hitherto been a weary and, for me, a pecu 
liarly painful one ; but we were now about to 
put in our last efforts, and on the up-grade too, 
which is easier than hoeing downhill ; and our 
hearts were light at the prospect of a speedy 
completion of labour seemingly without end. 
To each of us are allotted two rows — the 



264 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

sphinx has cheerfully taken on four, during the 
absence of her brother — and with a preliminary- 
sensation, as of convalescence from rheumatic 
fever, I fall into line with the others. There 
is a basket and a bucket some distance in front 
of each of us, and into the former the full-sized 
^magnum bonum is thrown, the small tuber going 
to the bucket as the special perquisite of " Petter " 
the Corpulent. When the two receptacles are 
filled we carry them to the cart, wherein they 
are emptied, and driven in from time to time to 
the house cellar. 

Our silence will be broken at twenty-minute 
intervals, mainly by Pappa, and less for the 
purposes of conversation than with the object 
of easing his poor back. 

" Ja-ja," he will say, as one setting a period 
to some satisfactory line of thought, and 
straightening his body with difficulty. " This 
Lord Mayor of London now. I suppose he will 
be drinking champagne both day and night ? " 

As with the majority of his class, this subject 
of riches — especially the supposed superfluous 
riches of somebody else — is one of unending 
speculative interest, and in that connection the 
Prince of Wales and the Lord Mayor, for no 
defined reason, appear to take precedence over 
the multi-millionaire, or sovereignty itself. 



DAY ON A BETTER CLASS FARM 265 

No, I observe, I didn't think that his lordship 
was in the habit of drinking champagne for 
twenty-four hours at a stretch. As a matter 
of fact, I beheved that the present holder of 
that office was an abandoned teetotaler, and 
hopelessly addicted to water. He might take 
that from me as proximate truth. 

Pappa fills his pipe slowly and thoughtfully — 
he carries his tobacco loose in his waistcoat 
pockets ; Mamma takes advantage of the spell 
of grace to re-adjust and retie her headkerchief ; 
and the sphinx, who has beaten us by five yards 
(her extra task notwithstanding), is asquat on 
her basket, and as sphinx-like of expression as 
her Lybian prototype. 

**Ja-ja," remarks Pappa, and there is not 
the least trace of conviction in his eyes, 
*' it may be even so, as you say ; but then 
he must be of a monstrous richness, and, 
you know, he must do something with his 
money." 

Rose-cheeked Mamma sighs, looking down at 
her horny palms and wooden shoes, as wondering 
how much spot cash she would have got if this 
Lord Mayor had happened to be her husband. 
The sphinx's thoughts are apparently other- 
where, for I catch her eyes on their return 
journey from the distant high road, and she 



266 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

blushes in a most unsphinx-like manner, not 
to say guiltily. 

Pappa, having failed to draw me on the socio- 
economic position of the offensively rich, pockets 
his pipe with the usual unconvinced smile of a 
better knowledge, and again stoops to his task. 
We have been plodding along for about an 
hour and a half at this weary back-breaking 
work, when mamma says "Ja-ja," drives her 
hoe into the ground, and drifts off towards the 
vaaningshus. Good ! 1 1 was the premonitory 
sign of breakfast and relief, and we fall to at 
our slashing, pulling, and groping in one last 
great spurt of failing strength. 

Finally, little Petronilla appears on the top 
of a distant boulder, from whence she is in the 
habit of calling the cows, and cries *' Kom ! ^* 
and with a sigh of the intensest relief we drop 
our hoes, and follow her home. 



CHAPTER XVI 

A DAY ON A BETTER-CLASS FARM Continued 

A BETTER-CLASS farmhouse, or rather villa, of 

modern Norway is a two-storied, timber-built 

structure, with a red-tiled roof and a covered 

porch in front. The cellar is formed by delving, 

or blasting, according to the nature of the site, 

and then by building up some three or four feet 

above the ground-line with solid stone masonry. 

The forming of these cellars often constitutes a 

heavy item in construction cost; but their solid 

and damp-proof properties are a sine qua non 

that cannot be ignored in a country of deep 

snows and heavy spring and autumnal rains. 

On this masonry the walls of stout logs are 

erected, the latter being securely mortised and 

tenoned at the corners, and the inner surfaces 

cemented and lined with moss to form a perfectly 

air-tight joint. The outside and inside of the 

walls are then match-boarded vertically, and the 

whole given a thorough coating of white paint. 

In a house such as this dwelt Pappa — who, 

by the way with Mamma, has really only two 

267 



268 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

consonants to his Norsk child-name, though, for 
exactitude of pronunciation, I have deemed it 
expedient to give him three. When you pass 
through the porch you will find yourself in the 
gangen, or hall, with a short flight of stairs 
leading to the upper floor. On the right is a door 
opening into my two rooms, and to your left is 
a corresponding portal giving access to Pappa's 
dual apartments — a drawing-room, or salon, and 
a bedroom (occasionally used as an office) for 
the old couple. The upper floor, or loft, is 
divided down its entire length by a wooden 
partition. The stair-head half of this space is 
open to the tiled roof, in which a pair of sky- 
lights have been placed for ventilating and 
lighting purposes, and the room itself is used as 
a sort of general wardrobe for the entire house- 
hold. There, beginning at the extreme end, 
you will find that each member has his or her 
allotted space along the match- boarded wall. 
Pappa leads off with an enormous wolfskin 
pelisse, a pair of spotted sealskin top-boots (of 
dimensions so monstrous that you might have 
safely stowed his little Petronilla away into 
either of them without any portion of her pro- 
truding), his best suit of clothes for Sunday and 
County Council occasions, three or four other 
suits for minor uses, and quite a museum of hats, 



DAY ON A BETTER CLASS FARM 269 

caps, scarves, and gloves. Thorvald comes next, 
with a display equally miscellaneous, if less im- 
posing. I follow on, with a wardrobe which 
Mamma and the sphinx are pleased to consider 
dangerously inefficient for climatic requirements ; 
and adjoining me are the habiliments of Mamma 
and Magnhild, and the doll-like vestments of the 
little Petronilla. But I may not expatiate unduly 
on that array of gowns, blouses, hats, and hand- 
kerchiefs, so chastely curtained in from profane 
scrutiny, and dust, by their immaculate draperies 
of brown holland, though it will be no breach of 
confidence to suggest that Mamma has no inten- 
tion whatever of remaining outside the fashions, 
and that in her smart, black silk bonnet with its 
quivering complement of artificial herbage and 
fruits, her paletot of passementerie over a well- 
cut gown of dark serge, she is anything but a 
quantity ndgligeable at the little chapel on the 
hill-top. The sphinx has also her own self- 
contained notions as to what is required of her 
for town visits, and, although a marquise hat 
without a feather is somewhat of an anomaly, 
the deficiency has been more than met by a satin 
bow of ample dimensions and a gemmed buckle 
of apparently fabulous worth. This and a charm- 
ing skirt of light blue cloth, a long jacket of a 
darker hue, and the indispensable light-figured 



270 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

blouse, are more than sufficient to produce a 
very disturbing effect on a certain young person, 
who may appear at any moment from the distant 
high road. 

Further along the wall is a tall clothes-press, 
within which the lavender-embalmed linens of 
the house are kept, and flanking it are a number 
of huge eighteenth-century trunks, the trans- 
mitted properties of pappas and mammas long 
since dead and buried. These trunks are gor- 
geously painted and ornamented with scrolled 
designs, and they bear the names of the original 
owners in long tendril-like letters of paint. They 
are now being used for their former purposes by 
the living members of the family, and on the 
principle, apparently, of the smaller the member 
the larger the trunk ; for that allotted to Pappa is 
no bigger than a small cistern, and little Petronilla 
might have easily stowed both him and Mamma 
away into hers, and locked it. Lastly, under the 
window at the other end of the loft, is the stout 
oaken family cradle, which has rocked not only 
the youngest generation into the walking stage, 
but has actually dealt with no less a personage 
than portly Pappa himself, who, puling and 
sprawling in its interior, was probably less 
spacious and Florentine of aspect than might 
have been desired. 



DAY ON A BETTER-CLASS FARM 271 

A door in the centre of the dividing partition 
gives into the retiring room of the sphinx and 
little Petronilla, a prettily ordered little compart- 
ment, with a dormer window, and a glorious out- 
look in summer over a perfumed sea of tossing 
meadow-bloom and the distant forest of brood- 
ing pine. Thorvald's room adjoins this. It 
contains his bed, table, chest of drawers, a 
number of framed photographs, a great deal 
too many tobacco-pipes, and in a corner, 
under a statuette of H.M. Kong Haakon^ a 
cheap fowling-piece of Belgium make, which I 
should be exceedingly sorry to discharge under 
any circumstances whatever. 

This plan of dwelling leaves nothing for cavil, 
nothing except one little drawback which Pappa 
fully acknowledges, but tacitly consents to its 
always remaining a drawback, because it happens 
to involve a skik which even the most en- 
lightened of his caste have not yet dared to 
violate. I allude to the want of a light in the 
gangen on winter nights, owing to the lack of a 
glass panel in any one of the three inner doors. 
For some unexplained reason, beyond, perhaps, 
an inherent secretiveness of procedure — cer- 
tainly not the cost of paraffin — a lamp is 
never under any circumstances placed in 
the hall. '*Ja-ja," Pappa conditionally assents 



272 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

with an easy air of good-natured condescen- 
sion when I point out the dangers of a glacial 
hall and stairs in the Cimmerian darkness of a 
midwinter night, and the trifling cost of the re- 
medial measure, ''there might" — could, would, 
and should — " be something in that idea of yours, 
and there ought possibly to be found some means 
for carrying it out." But the innovation has 
always remained hung up in the future potent- 
tials, or conditionals, and there it will always 
remain. Another curious instance of this lack 
of a sense of ordinary precaution is seen in the 
absence of sand, or sawdust, on the pavements of 
the towns during the slippery stages of winter. 
When the snows are in abeyance, and the so- 
called ice-winter prevails, it is practically impos- 
sible for the timorous to venture down some of 
their alpine streets otherwise than by clinging 
to doors, palings, and lamp-posts, like an in- 
ebriate. And on the farms the conditions are 
even worse ; for there the yards are usually at a 
very steep angle of incline : so much so, indeed, 
that I have been often compelled to negotiate 
them on all fours, and by propulsory methods 
peculiar to the seal. Of course the universal 
town custom of wearing galoshes in winter miti- 
gates the danger of accident to some extent ; but 
this does not apply in the country, where no self- 



DAY ON A BETTER CLASS FARM 273 

respecting bonde ever thinks of falling, and his 
wooden shoes answer all purposes for indoor 
cleanliness of traffic. Pappa says that the bonder 
might, could, would, and even should complain 
that the sand laid down would tend to wear 
out the iron-shod runners of their sleighs, and 
counsels my wearing wooden shoes : this is of 
course impossible in the town, and it makes very 
little difference to me in the country, beyond the 
nature and degree of my fall — which is, as a rule, 
more sudden and impressive. 

Mamma brings in my breakfast (she and the 
sphinx alternate in these duties) and lingers 
according to custom to impress upon me the dire 
necessity of my leaving no scrap, or drop, of it 
unconsumed, also requesting me as a particular 
personal favour not to be backward in applying 
for more. Now, as this meal invariably consists 
of a large plate of oatmeal porridge, a dish of fried 
bacon, a heaped platter of buttered Fransk brod 
or French bread, and at least four imperial pints 
of fresh milk, she has only herself to thank if I 
do not always see my way to oblige her. The 
breakfast finished, and the usual ceremony of 
refusal undergone in respect of a proposed second 
course of cakes, cheese, and coffee I return with 
Pappa (who has breakfasted with the others in 
the kitchen) to the potato patch: Mamma and 
18 



274 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

Magnhild having duly washed, dried, and put 
away the breakfast gear, and left little Petronilla 
to take charge of the house, joining us shortly 
afterwards. It is now nine o'clock, the sun is 
beginning to make itself unpleasantly felt, and 
we have five solid hours of ceaseless work before 
us ere there will be any hope of rest and dinner. 
The time passes in much the same manner as 
heretofore. Occasionally a bonde farmer on a 
cross-country visit to town will deviate to wish 
us ''god dag," and give us a longer spell of con- 
versational ease than usual. But we keep at it 
doggedly, spell or no spell, and when at last 
Thorvald comes driving down the avenue of 
chestnuts we have reduced the virgin potato 
patch to more than half its original dimensions. 
Mamma has long since drifted off, and as the 
sphinx shortly afterwards disappeared, I am led 
to suspect that preparations for further empha- 
sizing this wretched birthday of mine is not quite 
unconnected with the hiatus. Then Pappa fairly, 
squarely, and unconditionally throws up the 
sponge, and under the outrageous plea of 
wondering whether there would be any letters 
for him, seats himself on his basket in a collapsed 
state of expectancy. Eventually Thorvald comes 
up with " Fram " and our letters, and hitching 
the former to the cart drives the first load of 



DAY ON A BETTER-CLASS FARM 275 

potatoes to the cellar. Pappa follows, ostensibly 
to help house them, and leaning on my hoe I 
complacently await their return. But they do 
not return. So I seat myself on my basket to 
read my letters and await further developments. 
They arrive, almost immediately, in the guise of 
little Petronilla, who presents me with an apple 
and a ginger- bread cow, and says '' kom ! " and I 
follow her home. 

To enumerate all the courses, semi-courses, 
and courses from by-products (to say nothing of 
their ingredients), which mamma and the sphinx 
place before me with implacable zest, calling it 
merely '' middag," would be altogether too fatigu- 
ing to my readers. How it may be accomplished 
under the running strain of their field labours is 
indeed one of the wonders with which these 
wonderful women inspire one. Pappa, Thorvald, 
and I are only too glad of an opportunity to 
throw ourselves down for an interval of rest 
during food preparations, but the women, apart 
from a short siesta, broken into by the duties of 
clearing away and washing up, never rest for a 
moment in the course of their day's toil. The 
sphinx, in an unguarded moment of confidence, 
quite unusual with her, opines that women are 
more supple and pliable of body in the niggling 
and blood -to -the -head operations of potato- 



276 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

setting and digging, and the reaping and binding 
of corn. Men, she adds, with that provoking air 
of responsible matronhood, which immediately 
transforms me into a child to be minded, are 
more adapted for heavy work. 

Mamma commences operations by placing 
before me a soup of boiled rice and milk, with a 
flavouring of raisins, sugar, and cinnamon. Now 
as this is obviously a sweetmeat, ranking with 
puddings and their kind, I beg that she will be 
good enough to place it on the side-table for 
possible future dealing. This she does with the 
usual protests of amazement, and gives place to 
the sphinx, with a reserve plate of mutton broth, 
with its usual concomitants of barley and turnip. 
This is decidedly good : if not sufficiently allur- 
ing to warrant Mamma's vehement desires that 
I shall have another helping. For I know from 
unhappy experience that there must be some 
allowance made for later unexpected develop- 
ments from the kitchen. Mamma bustles ofif 
with a sigh of despair, and returns with a very 
large sirloin of beef on a very small dish : little 
Petronilla solemnly following — as a special birth- 
day concession — with the gravy in a sauceboat. 
It is a particularly tender and succulent joint, and 
it has been done to a turn. Of course there is 
very little yellow fat about it, as there seldom 



DAY ON A BETTER CLASS FARM 277 

is outside of England, and owing to the butcher's 
peculiar ideas of jointing the exact site of the 
undercut is rather a matter of doubt. But it 
will serve ; and Mamma, delighted beyond 
measure at the well turned compliment, departs 
chuckling, and leaves me to my joint, and my 
cabbage, and my potatoes, and my caraffe of 
water from the well, in peace. Later on the 
sphinx bears me in an immense plate of romme- 
grod, which she places before me with all the 
bland dignity of a Ritz waiter : departing with 
the remains of the previous course, and a half- 
suppressed reminiscent smile. That half-sup- 
pressed reminiscent smile has its history. It has 
to do with my culinary operations in respect of a 
joint which I undertook one day to roast in the 
presence of the entire household, after the 
manner in which we roast our joints in England. 
It was a great day. In fact a red-letter day, and 
never shall I forget the sphinx's uncontrollable, 
if rather opprobrious mirth when I discarded all 
that nice superficial fat from the baking pan in 
favour of a little hot water, flour and salt : a 
flagrant loss of opportunity which had an almost 
hysterical effect on Mamma, and sent Pappa and 
Thorvald into the salon, ostensibly to laugh. 

Now, this rommegrod, or sour cream porridge, 
is a national dish, a very satisfying dish, and a 



278 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

rich one, withal : but to the biHous it is not to be 
commended. The sour cream with the addition 
of some flour, is boiled, and stirred continually 
while boiling, until the butter product rises to 
the top. The butter is then skimmed off and 
served separately as a sauce : the grod itself 
being eaten with the usual accompaniments of 
milk, sugar and cinnamon. Great care is taken 
that the grod shall be continuously stirred during 
boiling, otherwise the result, whatever else it 
may be, will certainly not be rommegrdd. The 
dish is an old acquaintance, if not a very intimate 
friend of mine, and I partake sufficiently of it 
(without the sauce) to allay, in some measure, 
Mamma's sorrow, when she puts her head in at 
the door to note progress and inquire if I will 
have some le/se, I reply, "No," — courteously, if 
decidedly, *'No," — but if she will without undue 
trouble, be so good as to convert that comestible 
(I had nearly written combustible) into a pancake, 
I would be very happy to have dealings with it. 
This le/se is likewise a national food, and about 
the most primitive of its kind as you will ever 
meet with in the proverbial day's march. It is 
really nothing more than a dough of flour and 
water, rolled out more or less thinly — and served. 
The surface is then coated with margarine, or 
sugar, or treacle, and the dough (rolled up, like a 



DAY ON A BETTER-CLASS FARM 279 

small petition) is held in the hand and eaten as a 
jam roll is occasionally devoured by our London 
waifs. It is a common enough food in the up- 
lands, and I have found it very useful in the 
pocket when there was any prospect of getting 
lost among the fjelds ; for its staying, or rather 
intimidatory powers are almost up to the stand- 
ard of the gjed ost. But it must not be kept un- 
duly, or it will take unto itself the appearance of 
old parchment, and the consistency of shellac. I 
have at the moment of writing, upon my book- 
shelf, a thin volume in folio, made entirely by 
myself, beautifully (if apparently) leaved, bound 
and tooled, and it bears the title in old black 
letters : '' Mr William Shakespeare's Comedies, 
Histories, and Tragedies^ But it is nothing 
more than lefse, as anyone would find out who 
dropped it. And that is the reason why Mamma 
is always tentative in her inquiries in respect of 
lefse. 

Pappa comes in with the gracious dignity of a 
Lorenzo de' Medici (covertly chewing) to inquire 
if I am wanting anything. I reply, not just now 
I thank him, and he retires, to continue forth-on 
with all his courses, exhaustively, and — as a matter 
of course. 

The pancake arrives duly, neatly rolled and 
perfect of cooking and ingredients — if a little 



28o HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

before its time ; for it is immediately followed by- 
some bacon and eggs, a blanc-mange, a fruit- 
jelly, and some smorrebrod. But I have long 
since reached the mere tasting stage of progress, 
and if Mamma attributes this to symptomatic 
evidences of a malignant fever, or premature 
decline, I really cannot help it. I have no other 
means beyond empty compliment of assuaging 
the poignancy of her griefs. Little Petronilla 
is ushered in with an over- full glass of currant 
wine (Mamma's own concoction), and the lisped 
message that Pappa, Mamma, Thorvald, Magn- 
hild, and herself, say '' skaal da'' Which practi- 
cally sets a period to the dinner. For the coffee, 
cheese, and biscuits, which follow are looked 
upon more in the light of a satellite meal, or no 
meal at all. 

A lowing in the tun calls attention to the fact 
that the kusmancTs boy has brought the cattle 
home for housing while he has his dinner, and 
takes his mzddags lur, or after-dinner siesta. 
Magnhild goes out to the porch to give them 
greeting, and the oldest cow, who has known her 
since she was quite a little tot, comes up and 
lays her great head down with a gust of satis- 
faction on the sphinx's shoulder. How great 
is this affection as between these big lumbering 
creatures and the tiny fragile maid no one may 



DAY ON A BETTER-CLASS FARM 281 

ever gauge. I can only vouch for the fact that 
when sickness or old age ordained that one of 
these dumb ones should be removed, the unre- 
strained griefs of the sphinx and little Petronilla 
were most piteous to witness, and do or say what 
we might, they would not be comforted. And 
the dumb ones are no less cognisant of this affec- 
tion, and are not slow in evincing their gratitude 
for a lifetime of constant attention. There is an 
authenticated story relating to a little husmancCs 
boy, who had fallen into a lake and been drowned 
while herding his master's cattle, and the fact 
being brought to the knowledge of his bonde 
master, when, alarmed by their prolonged absence, 
he searched for and found his cattle knee-deep 
in the lake lowing piteously to the little drowned 
one to come out and take them home. 

There is quite a human look of recognition in 
the stolid eye which Magnhild's old favourite 
rolls up at me, as I stand looking down at her 
from the window : a look that almost seems to 
convey, "Ja-ja, I know all about you, too. I 
have been fostering you for a greater number of 
years than I care to think about, and I earnestly 
trust that I may never live to have any occasion 
to regret it." 

Tired as we undoubtedly are, notwithstanding 
the recuperative results of our lur, we all set to 



282 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

with a will to finish up the remaining portion of 
our task. The sun is now more than uncom- 
fortably hot, and Mamma, noticing our conditions, 
sends the sphinx over to the Vaaningskus under 
whispered orders. Thorvald is now of our party, 
and quite a gang in himself; but he will never 
catch up with his sister, who has an exasperating 
way of forging ahead without the least approach 
to effort, or exultation. She returns presently 
with a bottle of bilberry juice and a jug of spring 
water fresh from the well, and little Petronilla 
brings tumblers. We all drink a mutual '' skaal " 
in this most delicious of drinks that a thirsty 
person might desire, and I note the Norseman's 
peculiar method of drinking — as I have done 
before many a time and oft — wondering as to the 
reason of it ; for, however thirsty he or she may 
be, he never, as with us, takes a long drink, 
finishing out the contents of the glass, or cup, at 
a draught, but always in little sups, or gulps, of 
measured quantity, shaking up and tossing off 
the ultimate contents like a prescription. 

We are about to commence work again when 
a covey of blackcock and greyhen sweeps by us 
out of the woods and clatters into a birch tree, 
some sixty yards from the Vaaningskus windows. 
Thorvald exclaims, '' Hei, sanf" drops his hoe, 
and essays to reach the house, and his gun, by a 



DAY ON A BETTER-CLASS FARM 283 

circuitous and covered route. But he is too late. 
They have noted his movements, and are gone. 
Pappa remarks, '' Ja-ja — ja-ja : " in which senti- 
ment we all sympathetically concur. There are 
a number of squirrels about, running along the 
top of the boundary fence, or scolding at us from 
the safer retreat of aspen and oak. At times the 
great black, red-crested woodpecker will drop 
silently down at the foot of a dead pine bole, 
and hammer its way almost to the top before it 
notes our presence, and as silently departs. The 
smaller species, of a light green, is less shy, and 
will remain watching us from a tree top for quite 
a long while, before it dives with its piercing 
'' Hja-hja-hja-hja," into the recesses of the forest. 
Jays, singly or in couples, appear from time to 
time on a wooded knoll, and emulate the dis- 
cordance of their cousins, the magpies. The 
latter are always in, or about, the farm, winter 
and summer ; and although they are the most 
shameless of thieves when food in winter is 
scarce, they always look upon themselves as 
being de facto participants in our home life. The 
crows, being in a sense outlaws, maintain a 
much safer distance, and they are as difficult to 
approach, with a gun, as a fieldfare, or a wood- 
pigeon. They are grey-backed, and a smaller 
species than that of England, and are much 



284 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

less numerous. Foxes abound, and are a con- 
stant source of anxiety to Mamma : snatching her 
poultry in the middle of the tun, ay, and in the 
broadest of daylight. 

The setting sun sees us steadily at our labours, 
and the shadows of night are beginning to creep 
down from the fjelds when the sphinx completes 
her two rows, and returns to her Pappa to relieve 
him of one. We arrive at the end of our weari- 
some journey one after the other according to 
our several degrees of skill, and throw ourselves 
down on a bank of fern with a heartfelt '* Gud ske 
lov I " With the exception of the turnip-pulling 
(which is quite an inconsiderable task) some tree- 
felling, log-driving, and the light duties of chaff- 
cutting and corn-threshing, there will be no more 
field work to vex us until spring-time doth draw 
near. 

Arrived at the house with the last waggon-load 
of potatoes, and all our paraphernalia of work, 
we find the cows safely housed for the night, and 
the husmands boy playing " Hop Scotch " with 
little Petronilla in the uncertain light of the tun. 
Mamma and Magnhild repair at once to the 
fjose, or cowhouse, for milking necessities, leaving 
the mand folk to change their soil-stained clothes 
and make themselves presentable for the even- 
ing. Unlike their brethren of the interior the 



DAY ON A BETTER-CLASS FARM 285 

better-class farmers prefer quantity and quality 
to the many scant and coffee-diluted meals which 
prevail amongst the former ; and Mamma has 
unbounded faith in the virtues of oatmeal porridge, 
meat soups, and milk and eggs. My supper this 
evening is of the same nature which it has ever 
been in this little out of the way Vestland home 
— an immoderate supply of fresh, warm, and duly 
strained milk from my foster-mothers of xh^fjosey 
a large white loaf of Mamma's baking, and a 
plate of butter of the sphinx's own churning. 
Later in the evening, as I am deeply immersed 
in the chaste account of a Fifth Avenue wedding- 
feast as set forth in the columns of a home paper, 
little Petronilla appears suddenly before me, like 
a small spectre, and presenting me with three 
peppermints and half a pear, says " Kom ! " And 
I follow her into the salon. 

They all receive me upstanding, and not with- 
out a certain natural dignity, and usher me into 
the hoiscsde, in this instance the sofa, and Pappa 
fills up a number of little wine-glasses from the 
bottle of red-currant wine, which he keeps in an 
old oak and iron-bound hanging cupboard. I 
apologise for my dereliction in forgetting the 
occasion, and the bottle of old port wherewith to 
mark it, and promise to be less thoughtless on 
the following anniversary. Mamma says it is 



286 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

of no consequence whatever, as the red-currant 
wine is quite good enough for them, if I will take 
it tiltakke (make the most of it). They all, in- 
cluding little Petronilla, drink '* skaal " to me, 
and we then seat ourselves to pass the evening 
in the way they are in the habit of passing it 
when I am not present. For Mamma well knows 
that I would be more than beklempt, or ill at 
ease, were they to put themselves to any unusual 
deviations on my account. Therefore, Mamma 
goes on carding her wool by the stove, the sphinx 
goes on spinning it in the corner, little Petronilla 
takes up the thread of her last flirtation with me, 
Thorvald takes down his ''Oliver Twist" from 
its shelf, and Pappa, saying '' undskyld,'' puts 
on his spectacles and turns his attention to his 
diminutive local paper. And he goes steadily 
through all its columns, and with all the same 
plodding devotion with which he followed the 
rows of his potato-patch. There is no editorial, 
in our sense of that word. The sheet leads 
off with two columns of ''Sunday Thoughts" 
— usually a sermon — and generally follows 
on with a column and a half of such ab- 
sorbing subjects as " Top-dressing," or a dis- 
sertation on the proper treatment of cows 
during the calving season. "Foreign news" 
-comes next — mostly from Berlin sources — and 



DAY ON A BETTER-CLASS FARM 287 

if the international state of affairs is likely to 
involve Norwegian interests, the Herr Redaktor 
will have some short and pungent comments to 
add at the foot of the column. ** Local News" 
figures next, and is devoured by Mamma during 
some rare Sunday interval of inactivity. A half 
column or so is usually devoted at the end of 
the second page to some phenomenal abnormity 
within the four corners of the United States ; 
such as the birth of a cat with five legs, a hen 
with two heads, or a dog with none to speak of. 
It is scarcely the kind of paper about which 
young people would quarrel on a point of pre- 
cedence in perusal. Nevertheless when Pappa 
is quite through with the reading matter and all 
the advertisements, the sphinx will emerge from 
her corner and cut out the feuilleton at the 
bottom — generally speaking, a translated English 
serial — and put it away with the preceding 
numbered pages for reading and binding. But 
she has also her own paper — a monthly one — 
and so have Mamma and Thorvald ; and in this 
connection it will be interesting to note what 
class of paper is read by the average bonde, and 
to what extent journals are in permanent demand. 
Taking Meldalen as a typical bygd (not parti- 
cularly in touch with any town), Doctor E. Storen 
tabulates the results of his researches as under : — 



288 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 



Class of Paper. 
Comic 
Wit . 

Popular knowledge 
Missions, religious 
Temperance 
Dialect 

Women's suffrage 
Youths 
Children 
Sport . 
Newspapers 
Agricultural 
House and home 
Fashions 

It will be noted that papers dealing with 
women's suffrage are a minus quantity. This 
can hardly be otherwise, for the bonde wife will, 
as a general rule, vote (when she votes at all) 
as her mand votes, and the great majority of 
unmarried peasant girls are, owing to the poverty 
of the country, outside the cash standard of quali- 
fication. If their social condition is to undergo 
any betterment — and I have previously given 
some cogent reasons for such a desirability — the 
succour must come from without, from their 
sisters of the towns, who having now attained 
their heart's desire will doubtless crown their 



Per ICO Inhabitants. 

0.2 
0.2 

0.9 
1.2 
0.0 

17 
3-2 

0.2 

13.8 
0.9 
0.1 
0.4 



DAY ON A BETTER-CLASS FARM 289 

achievement by turning their attention to, and 
throwing some light of happiness into, the dark 
corners of the uplands. 

Mamma ceases carding her wool to insist that 
I shall partake of h^r fattig mands bakkehe (poor 
man's pastry), pointing out that birthdays do not 
occur every day — at least they ought not to in 
so far as Nature and the individual are concerned. 
I promise that I will do so if she will furnish me 
with the recipe ; for this is really a pastry which 
one ought to know something about, seeing that 
it is as popular in the towns among every class 
as it is in the country. Mamma forthwith pro- 
vides me with the recipe, which I note down and 
herewith transmit : 1 8 eggs, 2 lbs. of flour, i lb. 
of butter, a couple of small wine - glasses of 
cognac, some cinnamon finely ground, 2 lbs. of 
sugar, and some baking-powder. Mix all the 
ingredients thoroughly, roll out very thinly, cut 
into little circular cakes and fry in a deep pan 
of pork dripping or lard until of a light golden 
brown. You will find these cakes everywhere, 
especially during Christmas and Easter holi- 
days, and the Herr Grosserer's Frue will usu- 
ally offer fattig mands bakkehe when wine is 
brought in. 

The sphinx suddenly stays her spinning-wheel. 
She has heard something. No one else has. I 
19 



290 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 



1 



have not. She has, like all her Norwegian sisters, 
the ear and eye of a lynx — though you would 
probably not think so looking at her. The door 
opens, and a young man, a seafaring young man, 
and in an obvious suit of Sunderland reach-me- 
downs, enters and wishes us god morgen. He 
comes forward very much embarrassde de sa per- 
Sonne, and shakes hands with us all in turn, 
including (with a futile assumption of after- 
thought) the sphinx. Mamma places a chair 
in the centre of the room, on which he seats 
himself well forward, as on a sea chest, deposit- 
ing his cap for better security underneath it. 
Pappa, laying aside his paper, succeeds in extract- 
ing the three following points of information : 
that this young man's barque had arrived this 
morning, that he had been paid off, and that 
not having anything better to do (here he had 
blushed furiously under somebody's reproving 
eye) he thought he might just as well call up 
at the gaard and pay his respects. The sphinx 
has substituted her knitting for the spinning- 
wheel, and has moreover found a new place, 
in another corner, more or less behind us all : 
probably with a view to getting as far away 
as possible from this very casual young man, 
or possibly, though I do not vouch for it, that 
she may be in a better position to observe 



DAY ON A BETTER.CLASS FARM 29 1 

somebody without herself being generally ob- 
served. 

The conversational stores of this young man 
bashful are soon thoroughly depleted, and after 
an hour's interval of continuous and deadly silence, 
he gets out his cap from under the chair, dusts it 
thoughtfully, is about to assume it, doesn't do so, 
and then, with an appealing look into the corner, 
says "Ja-ja." Thereat the sphinx glides noise- 
lessly from the room, and the young man, after 
some decent interval has elapsed, wishes us all 
£'od nat and follows her. Pappa fetches his long 
meerschaum pipe from the rack by the stove, and 
is about to fill it when the door slowly opens, 
and a cadaverous, ill-shorn face, with jetty eyes 
and hair, is thrust into the room, and wishes us 
*'god morgen" (this salutation is current at any 
hour of the day or night.) Pappa again rises 
and orders it to come in. It does so, revealing 
a connective body, clothed in rags, and it is 
followed by a sallow-faced woman with a baby in 
her arms. These are Taters, or foreign gipsys ; 
who are not above a comfortable night's lodging 
under a roof, when the baby is sick, and it is 
known (by mysterious runes on gate-posts) that 
Pappa will not turn them from his door. Pappa 
lights a lantern, and, having extracted a promise 

from these homeless ones that they will not, 
19* 



292 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

under any circumstances, use a naked light on 
his premises, invites me to accompany him, and 
we conduct our visitors into the bryggehus. 
Here they are given a comfortable shake-down 
of straw, and told to pass the night in peace : 
Mamma coming in shortly afterwards with 
a substantial supper, and her assurance that 
they shall have a cup of coffee and some 
smdrrebrod in the morning before they leave. 

Returning to the salon, we are surprised to 
hear the clock striking nine — an hour when, 
under normal circumstances, we ought to have 
been in bed ; for the horse, and the cows, and 
" Petter*' the Corpulent require very early atten- 
tion. The sphinx, who has seen her nautical 
young man well off the premises, and even as far 
as the distant high road, is again seated at her 
spinning-wheel, and again I can almost swear to 
the covertly defiant toss of the little tow-head, 
conveying the fact that she has found time, 
during my temporary absence, to remake my 
bed and re-order my room. Thorvald, who has 
got as far as the murder of Nancy, puts away his 
book with a vague look at me as though I, of 
my London experiences, were in some way 
morally responsible for it. Mamma goes off 
into the next room, to pull out her telescopic bed- 
stead, with the bedclothes piled atop, and order 



DAY ON A BETTER-CLASS FARM 293 

them for the night ; and little Petronilla, who 
has fallen asleep in the rocking-chair, wakes up 
suddenly with the unwonted bustle, and staring 
somnolently at us all in turn, says, '' Kom, nu, 
Magnhild ! " whereupon the latter, with her 
bright early-morning smile, says " God nat, da," 
to me, and takes her little sister upstairs to bed. 
Pappa, who has already divested himself of his 
coat, wishes me **god nat," with the genial 
courtliness of a '' Magnifico " conferring a 
charter ; Mamma says ** Ja, god nat, da," and 
smilingly adds, in my own idiom, '* Slip vel " ; and 
Thorvald, with the murder of Nancy and my 
moral responsibility for it obviously preying 
on his mind, says, '' Ja-ja — god nat, da," and, 
removing his shoes, betakes himself to his up- 
stairs room, and bed. Finally, I also retire, full 
of bodily aches and pains, to the solitude of my 
bedroom. 

The stove is crackling right merrily under the 
sphinx's thoughtful ministrations, the night is 
chilly, and from my window I can see the fjordal 
mists rising like incandescent wool under the 
beams of the full moon. The scene is sufficiently 
ethereal, not to say transplendent, to tempt me 
to open the casement and lean out in moody 
contemplation. Many and miscellaneous are the 
sounds that are borne to the ear by the pure, fresh 



294 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 

airs of the night, but they come from afar and are 
in no sense disturbing ; the roar of a distant water- 
fall mingles with the muffled boom of combers 
breaking upon a rock-bound coast, the bark of a 
dog on some mountain farm, the shriek of a fox, 
or the hoot of an owl from the deeps of the 
forest, and, in the near distance, the beat of 
" Fram's " restless hoofs in his stall, and the 
smothered drone of *' Petter" the Corpulent fatly- 
slumbering. Then, as the moon swings up over 
the fjelds, and, with a change of the wind, these 
sounds die down and cease, a window is opened 
above me, and a young girl's voice, tremulous, 
fresh, so rarely sweet, softly croons into the 
chills of the night the seldom lament of the 
young peasant heart communing direct with 
Nature : the burden that has been caught into 
the score of a few only of Norway's gifted sons : 
the embodiment (who shall say ?) of centuries of 
sorrows bravely met and mutely borne. Even 
with the last note, as of tears suppressed — hidden 
under the mask of a sphinx — the voice is hushed, 
the casement is closed, and, with a shift of the 
wind, the rumble and roar of distant waters 
essay to carry on the sad refrain. The moon, in 
its progress, takes up fjeld after fjeld in cold, im- 
partial review, revealing their wooded flanks 
and snow-laden tops, even as we shall see them 



DAY ON A BETTER-CLASS FARM 295 

in some happier dream : silvering the seas, lakes, 
torrents, and glaciers, and peering down, as of 
commiseration, into the sombre crevices v^^hcre 
the forgotten ones lie, sleeping. 



INDEX 



A 

Amundsen, Raold, Ii6 
Amusements, 135 
Archer, William, 141 



6 



Balls, 174 

Bjornson, Bjornstjerne, 140, 173 

Bobsleighs, 169, 171 

Boyesen, 141 

Brandes, 141 

" Bridge," 174 

Bull, Jacob, 141 

,, Olaf, 141 

„ Ole, 139 



Caspari, 141 
Charities, 189 
Cheeses, 45, 70, 86 
Children, 29 
Cigars, 2 
Clubs, 4 
Coffee, 89, 251 
Commercial travellers, 114 
Crime, 228 



D 



Divorce, 222 

Drama and the theatres, 1 39, 173 

Drink, 224, 226 



Education, 34, 44, 95. 215 
Emigration, 36, 160 



Engagements, 221 

Englishmen, idiosyncrasies of, 261 



F 



Farms, better class, 247, 267 

Fauna, 282 

Fish, 67 

Fishing, 71, 142, 144 

Flats, 23 

Food, 57, 77 

Friendship (the veninde), 169 

Funeral, village, 204 



Game, 66, 81, 142 

„ big, 144 
Garborg, Arne, 141, 211 

,, Hulda, 141 
Gosse, Edmund, 141 
Grieg, 4, 139 
Gymnasiums^ 49 



H 



Haakon VII., H.M. King, 37, 160, 

271 
Hamsun Knut, 141 
Heiberg, 141 
Holberg, 173 
Hospitals, 202, 207 
Hotels, 113 
Husmand^ the, 99 



I 



Ibsen, 140, 217 
Inquisitiveness, 153 



»97 



298 HOME LIFE IN NORWAY 



K 

Kielland, Alexander L., 141 
Kitchens, 104 
Kjerulf, 139 
IConditorier, 85, 127 
Krag, Brothers, 141 



Lasson, 139 
Lie, Jonas, 140 
Literature, 139 
Litigation, 227 



M 

Marriage, 12, 319 
Maud, H.M. Queen, 224 
Meat, 58, 74 
Music, 135 



N 

Nansen, Fridtjiof, 116 
Nserup, Carl, 141, 211 
Newspapers, 6, 286 
Nordraak, 139 
Norway, darker, 189 
Nurses, 106 



O 

Olaf, Crown Prince, 224 
Option, local, 125, 226 



Peasant — 

Characteristics, 222 
Commissions, 121 
Courting, 234 
Customs, 239 
Etiquette, 228 
Funerals, 204 
Homes, 2H 
Hospitality, 180 

Property, 221 

Prydz, Alvilde, 141 



Restaurantt, I2f 



Salaries, i 

Salmon fishing;, 6S, 144 

Salvation Army, 196, 203 

Sanatoria, 150 

Schools, 34, 44 

Seasons, 183 

Servants, 93 

Sinding, 139 

Skaal ! 13, 237 

Skating, 148 

Ski, 146 

Smorrebrod, 108 

Sport, 141 

Svendsen, 139 



Tea, 90, 253 
Tourists, 40, 179 
Towns, life in, 153 
Tramps (gipsies), 291 
Tschudi, Clara, 141 



U 

Undset, Sigrid, 141 
University, 50 



Vegetables, 62, 67, 81 
Vinje, Aasmund, 140 



W 

Welhaven, 140 

Wergeland, 140 

Winterhjelm, 139 

Women — 
as M.P.'s, 39 

,, police constables, 39, 219 
,, wage earners, 163, 167 
Appearance and dress, 42 
Education, 44 
Influence, 43, 207 



PRtNTKD BY 

TDRNBULL AND SfEARS 

2D1NBURGH 



f 



ipt^ 14 1918 



